The views expressed in this article are strictly those of Max Wideman.
The contents of the book under review are the copyright property of the author.
Published here October 2018

Introduction | Book Structure | What We Liked: Part 1, Part 2
Downside | Summary

Downside

This is rather personal. In her About the Author piece,[19] author Barbara Davis lists no less than 10 different titles and roles she has held, so one may well ask: "What's in a name?" Well the name is important because she also claims to have interviewed and assessed hundreds of resources (emphasis added). The word "resources" appears again in Chapter 12 under the heading Hiring change-ready Resources. Yes, I know that the use of the label "human Resources" is common practice, but I am glad I have not been one of the interviewees or hires because I don't like being thought of as just a "resource". Isn't that a bit demeaning? After all, whoever they are, they are all people, and surely adopting the right attitude towards people in OCM, isn't that absolutely essential?

Moving on, we found Chapter 8 a bit chaotic. There are four OCM changes to describe, but they are not each dealt with in the same way for comparison, nor in our view are they in logical order, see footnote #20.

If you are going to embark on an important Organizational Change Management venture, it seems to us that it would be wise to read Chapters 10 and 11 first, and get those recommendations in place before you start. If that is true, then perhaps these chapters would be better placed at the beginning of the book rather than at the end. That's because, as with any project, you want to start with success in mind and know what success looks like from the beginning.

As a point of interest, Chapter 10 includes a subsection titled "Leveraging the Balanced Scorecard". You have probably heard of the name but may not know what it is. Barbara Davis describes it here as:

"The balanced score card is a strategy performance management tool ... that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by the staff within their control and monitor the consequences arising from these actions."[21]

The Scorecard covers four themes or perspectives: Financial, Customer, Internal, Learning and Growth. Of course each of these have to be defined in some detail and collecting the data on a regular basis is not as easy as you might think. That's because you have to rely on the information owners to first collect it and then to render it up in a consistent manner. The problem is that it represents extra work for them, with no evident benefit.

What We Liked, Part 2  What We Liked, Part 2

19. On page xiii
20. Chapter 8, pp 141-157. The order as presented in the book is ADKAR, Kotter, IIEMO, and AIDA. As referenced in Table 6 p155, it is the same except that the second is described as "Kotter 8-step Model. But based on the length of Barbara's texts we think the order of the last two should be IIEMO last because it is the longest description at over 8 pages compared to the others at only 2 or 3 pages.
21. Ibid, p199
 
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