SHORTLISTED: CMI Management Book of the Year Awards 2017 - Management Futures Category Using ground-breaking modelling, Big Change, Best Path brings unique insights to the dynamics and process of organizational change, understanding success and failure, defining and describing the drivers and conditions of change, and the patterns and paths of organizational change. Author Warren Parry from Accenture Strategy shows that a whole new way of managing change is possible, from empirical benchmarking, predictive approaches that highlight the specific actions needed at any point of a change programme, and visualization for senior managers to show how each part of an organization is responding. The author also challenges many of the myths of change management and the dynamics of how organizations respond to change, clearly showing the common pitfalls and misunderstandings. Big Change, Best Path explains a new, more analytical way and process for driving successful change, and presents a ground-breaking vision for the future of how organizations can become more agile and resilient.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

In this clear-eyed, candid, and ultimately reassuring

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: • The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients • The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping • The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Little changes can make a big, big difference! In The Little Book of Big Change, psychologist Amy Johnson shows you how to rewire your brain and overcome your bad habits—once and for all. No matter what your bad habit is, you have the power to change it. Drawing on a powerful combination of neuroscience and spirituality, this book will show you that you are not your habits. Rather, your habits and addictions are the result of simple brain wiring that is easily reversed. By learning to stop bad habits at the source, you will take charge of your habits and addictions for good. Anything done repeatedly has the potential to form neural circuitry in the brain. In this light, habits and addictions are impersonal brain wiring problems that result from taking your habitual thinking as truth, and acting on that thinking in the form of doing your habit—over and over. This book offers a number of small changes you can make in your everyday life that will help you stop your bad habit in its tracks. If you want to understand the science behind your habit, make the decision to end it, and commit to real, lasting change, this book will help you to finally take charge of your life—once and for all.

Managing Change in Organizations, second edition, explores a broad range of perspectives on change management, encouraging critical reflection and making sense of a complex field of theories. Its unique approach, based around three key perspectives of change, will help you to understand: · How change is accomplished – the tool perspective · What change means for those involved – the process perspective · Why change is initiated (and whether it is necessary) – the critical perspective Updated throughout to include new examples, case studies and exercises, this essential text offers you the chance to learn pragmatic tools for managing change, as well as gain an in-depth understanding of different theories and their values. Stefan Sveningsson is Professor of Business Administration at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University. Nadja Sörgärde is Senior Lecturer in Business Administration at the School of Economics and Management, Lund University.

For the first time, an award-winning Harvard professor shares his wildly popular course on classical Chinese philosophy, showing you how ancient ideas—like the fallacy of the authentic self—can guide you on the path to a good life today. Why is a course on ancient Chinese philosophers one of the most popular at Harvard? Because it challenges all our modern assumptions about what it takes to flourish. Astonishing teachings emerged two thousand years ago through the work of a succession of Chinese scholars exploring how humans can improve themselves and their society. And what are these counterintuitive ideas? Transformation comes not from looking within for a true self, but from creating conditions that produce new possibilities. Good relationships come not from being sincere and authentic, but from the rituals we perform within them. A good life emerges not from planning it out, but through training ourselves to respond well to small moments. Influence comes not from wielding power but from holding back. Excellence comes from what we choose to do, not our natural abilities. In other words, The Path “opens the mind” (Huffington Post) and upends everything we are told about how to lead a good life. Its most radical idea is that there is no path to follow in the first place—just a journey we create anew at every moment by seeing and doing things differently. “With its…spirited, convincing vision, revolutionary new insights can be gleaned from this book on how to approach life’s multifarious situations with both heart and head” (Kirkus Reviews). A note from the publisher: To read relevant passages from the original works of Chinese philosophy, see our ebook Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi: Selected Passages, available wherever books are sold.

PROJECT BENEFIT REALISATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT Dispels the confusion between project management success and project success, showing how project sponsors can govern their projects to succeed in delivering the strategic benefits originally envisaged Project management success does not automatically lead to project success. Many large projects fail to live up to expectations, with between half and two-thirds of large projects either failing to deliver or delivering few strategic benefits. Traditional project management resources focus on delivering a project on time and on budget, yet they fail to supply top managers, many of whom find themselves in the role of accidental project sponsors, with guidance on how to govern their projects to succeed. Project Benefit Realisation and Project Management: The 6Q Governance Approach bridges the strategy to performance gap by providing boards, senior managers and project sponsors with the six critical questions necessary to diagnose the health of any project. Presenting a systematic framework developed from research cases of successful and unsuccessful projects in various types of organisations, this practical guide enables those in top management to determine if their strategy or policy is on track and to assess whether a project is likely to deliver the expected benefits. The text features real-world examples illustrating how concepts can be applied to different types of projects in engineering, construction, information technology, business transformation and many others. This must-have guide is designed to help top managers and other stakeholders: Clarify the link between business outcomes, benefits, and strategy to evaluate where effort should be directed Assess how much behavioural change is required to effectively implement strategy and realise desired benefits Select a project sponsor committed to influencing key stakeholders to make necessary changes and intercede to resolve issues as they arise Establish how success will be measured before a project begins, to gauge sponsor commitment and ensure project goals are not changed to match whatever is achieved Ask if the right culture is in place to ensure all relevant information is being reported Determine teams’ ability to adapt and change plans in response to issues arising in the project Monitor if the project is on track to realising the benefits and have a process in place to cancel failing projects Project Benefit Realisation and Project Management: The 6Q Governance Approach is an indispensable volume for board members, project sponsors, project advisors and those in senior positions who find themselves in the role of accidental project sponsors.

'Game-changing. Katy Milkman shows in this book that we can all be a super human' Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit How to Change is a powerful, groundbreaking blueprint to help you - and anyone you manage, teach or coach - to achieve personal and professional goals, from the master of human nature and behaviour change and Choiceology podcast host Professor Katy Milkman. Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the study of behaviour change. An engineer by training, she approaches all challenges as problems to be solved and, with this mind-set, has drilled into the roadblocks that prevent us from achieving our goals and breaking unwanted behaviours. The key to lasting change, she argues, is not to set ever more audacious goals or to foster good habits but to get your strategy right. In How to Change Milkman identifies seven human impulses, or 'problems', that commonly sabotage our attempts to make positive personal and professional change. Then, crucially, instead of getting you to do battle with these impulses she shows you how to harness them and use these as driving forces to help instil new, positive behaviours - better, faster and more efficiently than you could imagine. Drawing her own original research, countless engaging case studies and practical tools throughout to help you put her ideas into action, Milkman reveals a proven, inspiring path that can take you - once and for all - from where you are today to where you want to be.

This unique book provides a novel and challenging framework for understanding and influencing organizational change. It reimagines managing and leading change as the mindful mobilisation of maps, masks and mirrors.