Read more
Informationen zum Autor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. Klappentext This book presents a comprehensive overview and an authoritative model for how and, in some cases how not to, institute change in organizations. Chapter 1 The "Big Three" Model of Change The approach of the year 2000, with its millennial label and transformational implications, suggests the possibility of an equally profound change in our economic life and the institutions -- primarily business firms -- that populate it. In fact, even though the number has a highly spurious precision, its symbolism is appropriate. The world is undergoing many major transitions, some of which involve the meaning of business and the character and shape of the organizations that carry it out. Most striking is the strong convergence of streams of thought and experience alike coming from academic theorists and practicing managers, from avowed free-market partisans and committed social democrats, from regulators and those regulated, from countries as diverse as Singapore and South Africa, the U.S.A. and the former U.S.S.R., Vietnam and Venezuela. This trend -- or more accurately, this tidal wave -- is becoming a universal model for organizations, especially large ones. This model describes more flexible organizations, adaptable to change, with relatively few levels of formal hierarchy and loose boundaries among functions and units, sensitive and responsive to the environment; concerned with stakeholders of all sorts -- employees, communities, customers, suppliers, and shareholders. These organizations empower people to take action and be entrepreneurial, reward them for contributions and help them gain in skill and "employability." Overall, these are global organizations characterized by internal and external relationships, including joint ventures, alliances, consortia, and partnerships. There are, of course, differences in detail. Professional firms, service businesses, and manufacturing organizations do not look identical. Japanese keiretsu are not identical with their American industry and market counterparts. Decentralizing the National Health Service in Britain is not the same task as privatizing British Telecom or breaking up AT&T. Nevertheless, much of this is cosmetic; the management principles, operating values, and critical features defining the day-to-day behavior in those organizations are strikingly similar, and even the differences in detail are disappearing over time as global competition intensifies, confronting firms with a close look at others and forcing the routine and continuing transfer of practices from one to another. Under these circumstances, the question most appropriate for the 1990s is not what the competitive world organization should look like but how to become one. Advice on change methodology is itself a flourishing business. Many people tell managers how to achieve competitiveness, though the recipes, the prescriptions, and, above all, the jargon are different. Some offer technologies for implementing a particular concept, such as total quality control. Others tinker with this organizational feature, fix that one, and educate people, the reward being the promised land of organizational transformation. This sort of"revitalization" is only one route to corporate transformation. There are also "revolutionaries" who are impatient with the slow pace of reformist change or who distrust the managers guiding it. Throw out the whole thing and start over again, they urge. Overthrow management, change control, shuffle the assets, and the organization can be recreated. But these revolutions and battles for control, however effective in one sense, remain costly and unproven in others. In practice, these notions have also led to some prominent media events, such as Italy's Carlo de Benedetti's battle for Société Générale in B...
