White Papers Archive
  The Accidental Leader
  Its lonely at the top
 
  Ten functions of today's planners
  In our experience, corporate planning departments
 
  Focus Group Results
  Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers?
 
  The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons
  Managing Major Organizational Change: Key Elements
 
  Of Teams and Teambuilding
  All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
 
  Three Dimensions of Leadership
  Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuition, corroborated by experience
 
  Having a Great Company
  Want to have a great company? Across all industries and in a surprisingly broad range of economic conditions, only 6% - that’s about one in 17 - consistently out-perform their peers.
 
  Strategic Planning Committee
  Developing an Appropriate Fact-Base for Strategy Making
 
  Managing Major Organizational Change
  These principles give rise to approaches calling for the involvement of larger groups than are typically involved in a change process.
 
  Business Innovation…Table Stakes for "Stayin Alive"
  We often begin engagements with an intergroup competition calling for teams of people to assemble a "product" or achieve a goal by working together toward a "best of breed" solution.
 
  Kipp & Associates

The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons -
Managing Major Organizational Change: Key Elements

Tempting as it is to view organizational change as a function of leadership imperatives to “raise the bar” or managerial attention to good ideas “from the coal-face”, whole systems change inevitably involves engaging everyone in the process of building the road forward. Failure to do so always generates problems of “buy-in”, delays execution and creates unnecessary casualties.

Most organizations going through such a process are involved in concurrently managing both a “work plan” and a “change plan”. While market imperatives and stakeholder expectations drive the former, the latter reflects the needs of those who must carry things out as modified by leadership’s view of how sustainable change actually happens. Intentionally or otherwise, there are typically seven dimensions of activity in most change plans:

Change Plan Elements

Leadership…preparing everybody to lead the change from the CEO through senior management to the “worker bees” and account reps where real repositioning occurs. Most people lack an explicit theory of how things change and have a limited repertoire of change management tools and techniques. Leadership often gets “ragged” where personal sacrifice and tough choices are concerned. And formal leadership invariably makes at least one of a handful of mistakes common to leading strategic change.

Strategy…elaborating the vision, the path and the operational requirements for the future. What do key ideas really mean in behavioral rather than ideological terms; what is the case for change…the “wake up call”; what won’t we do? How well is it understood; how open is it to modification?

Initiatives…this refers to starting specific things that have the capacity to positively impact performance or significantly improve a critical business process. Sometimes it means creating “visual aides” that let people know this is serious…lip service not allowed. Many change efforts fall apart at this “chop wood; carry water” level.

Development…training, yes, but genuine growth well beyond instrumental skills for individuals, natural work groups, cross-functional teams and the whole organization…including the larger system of suppliers, distributors, customers and collateral components of parent companies.

Small Victories…regular reasons to celebrate as a group and acknowledge progress during a difficult transformation. What are the landmarks that have been set out ahead? Do they stir everyone’s blood or only that of investors and senior management?