Making change work : practical tools for overcoming human resistance to change

Keeping up in a highly competitive and fast-changing world is tough. Managers have to keep business practices current with evolving trends and customer expectations. This requires organizational change, and people often respond to change with stress, fear and even hostility. This human resistance to change is the biggest reason why organizational change efforts often fail to live up to their potential. Projects fail not so much from technical inadequacy as from failure to gain acceptance among the people they will affect. The price of a failed change can be steep, in loss of competitive position, loss of credibility and lowered internal morale. Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization’s readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many practical tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world. It will particularly benefit technical managers dealing with the reality of human responses to change and uncertainty Annotation As organizations strive to remain ahead of the competition, there will inevitably and often come the need for change. All successful organizations regularly use change to improve processes and increase performance. While these times of change can be a great opportunity for an organization, it also can be a time of stress and angst for all involved. Not all organizations are in a position to make these changes effectively and efficiently, and for many their efforts often fall short of the intended goals. Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. The price of a failed change effort can be steep, both monetarily and in a loss of credibility. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization's readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world Palmer is a management consultant specializing in leadership and organizational development. Written for people trying to improve their organizations--executives, managers, project sponsors and leaders, and team leaders and members--Palmer's text addresses understanding and dealing with the human aspect of change. The author provides practical tools for assessing an organization's readiness for change and an easily understood, step-by-step model to ensure a change project will be successfully accepted by an organization. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)