Book review
Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness
By Jerry I. Porras, Edward E. Lawler III and Christopher G. Worley
Published by Pfeiffer Wiley, 2006,
ISBN 0-78798-061-7
As someone who is passionate about the need for organisations to learn how to change in a sustainable, non-toxic way that yields competitive advantage, I was looking forward to my friend and colleague, Chris Worley's new book on Organisational Change, co-written with Ed Lawler. I have not been disappointed. In today's world the pace of change is ever accelerating. While we all (or most of us) fear change to varying degrees, we must nevertheless cope with faster paced, more numerous changes year on year. In order to remain successful, companies need to be agile and flexible; to do that they need to be able to change at will, quickly and easily. Lawler and Worley believe that the only way to ensure that organisations can change that often and that quickly, is to design them for change.
Most organisations are designed for stability and not for change. So when they try to implement change, more often than not it fails. For sustainable competitive advantage, Lawler and Worley say the ability to change is an organisation's best bet.
At the centre of the B2Change model is an organisation's identity ? ?a relatively stable set of core values, behaviours and beliefs.? Around that are three areas, Strategising, Designing and Creating Value. This all takes place in the context of differing environmental scenarios. B2Change organisations know that no one can predict the future; in fact the way businesses used to do this (extrapolating from the past) is a recipe for disaster. Therefore, savvy companies spend the time, effort and energy to think about different possibilities and how they might respond to them.
A Designing "process" is used to
- structure for effectiveness and change
- develop the right information, measurement and decision making processes
- acquire the right talent and ? manage human capital.
There is a chapter on each area that gets down into the detail of what needs to happen. Some of what they say is not that surprising or different, some is. For instance, they suggest that job descriptions are a waste of time (something I have certainly long felt) and that instead B2Change organisations have person descriptions for each employee. These should capture specific, measurable behaviours that a person needs to master. The focus here is on what a person CAN do rather than their day-to-day performance.
They also talk about building a company of leaders ? people in B2Change organisations must lead themselves and be pro-active in their own development (?Just in time development?) as they see the need arise. Shared leadership is essential for a B2Change company. Of course this will affect reward systems and also what gets rewarded. For instance, rewards in these companies are linked not just to a person's skills, the knowledge that they master and use, but also to the organisation's performance. Both performance and change must be rewarded.
You may think that this type of organisation does not yet exist, but there are examples of companies that are succeeding, companies who are doing things differently. A B2Change organisation strings a series of temporary competitive advantages together and competes with itself over the long run.
There is good news for OD people too: ?A workforce that can continually renew itself and deftly orchestrate organizational changes is rare, valuable and difficult to imitate. As a result a strong human capital base with change-related knowledge and skills is a major source of competitive advantage.? This is what I believe we will be seeing in organisations if they wish to remain competitive and thrive. This is an interesting, challenging book that will most probably become a classic.