Change Management: New Words for Old Ideas

By Garth Holloway

This book is the result of Garth Holloways twenty years of experience in the management consulting industry. In it, he shares many of the key lessons he has learned about spearheading change. While he addresses timeworn topics, his approach is refreshingly different to the mainstream. This highly readable collection of articles will cause even the most experienced practitioners to re-evaluate their ideas as Garth as encourages you to:

Demand more. The last 20% is worth more than the first 80%.

Carefully consider just whose problems you should be thinking about.

Become creactive: where creative meets active.

Learn how managing change and managing risk are practically synonymous.

Use KPIs more effectively. If youre not going to manage it, dont bother to measure it.

Deal effectively with the maliciously compliant, those dangerous employees who do exactly what they are told to do, neither more nor less.

Organise for organizational learning. Realise that driving change in your organization means engaging the hearts and minds of the people first.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jan 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493131761

Garth Holloway

I do not require a website.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Garth Holloway.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4931-3175-4

                eBook           978-1-4931-3176-1

All rights are reserved; subject to; Garth Holloway claims no copyright over any material including images referenced to third parties. In this case copyright is retained by the owner of the material.

For the avoidance of doubt, you must not edit or change or transform any of the material (in any form or media) without Garth Holloway’s prior written permission.

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Rev. date: 03/17/2014

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Preface

Why Change Needs Politically Incorrect Managers

Why Entrepreneurs Need To Take Baths

Managing Risk, A Trigger For Change

Getting The Measure Of KPIs

Malicious Compliance: The Smiling Serpent

It’s Only Kinky The First Time

Show Me The Money

Perception: It’s Not What You Think

Managing Change

The Risk of Risk Management

Organisational Learning: It Takes Some Training

Acknowledgements

With thanks to:

Shamim Ur Rashid for the cover design;

Victor-Adrain Cruceanu for the graphics;

Stephany Aulenback for editing the book;

Charles, Kailash, and Venkatesh for their friendship; and Russell Swanborough

for informing so much of my foundation thinking; and finally

Amit Kumar Das for his unbelievable inspiration.

Dedication

To my late father with all my love.

Preface

Thank you for taking the time to read some or all of the articles contained in this collection.

This is the second in a series of three books. The first book is a collection of longer articles on a selection of the common business concepts that a manager may be expected to encounter throughout the various stages of their career and the third provides a range of tools and techniques for the manager’s kitbag.

The purpose of the book is to consolidate and capture my thoughts on the many facets of change management.

The articles are not intended to provide detailed instructions or methodology on how to apply each concept. Rather the intent is to provide enough detail to convey the essence of the concepts, sufficient for the reader to apply them in their own business without the rigidity of an instruction manual.

As each paper is written as a stand-alone article, a number of the central concepts are repeated in the different papers. This has been kept to a minimum but could not be completely avoided.

Why Change Needs Politically Incorrect Managers

The leadership of transformational change has to be one of the most difficult disciplines a manager can master. For me, the biggest hurdle is the capacity of managers to be unreasonable for a sustained amount of time.

If you argue with a fool, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. Anonymous.

Having worked in the discipline of change for over twenty years I have learnt a few things:

1.   80% is frequently considered good enough.

2.   Consultants need to be forced out of their comfort zones.

3.   Sponsorship is a misunderstood role.

4.   A project is always stronger when there is a person who is willing to be politically incorrect.

As a consultant, it is not difficult to lead the thinking at a client site. This is almost what you get paid for. But despite all the intellectual property a consulting firm has in the cupboard, the thought leadership provided by a consultant is frequently no better than the sum of their experiences. And because the client does not really know better, this leadership is treated as appropriate for the project at hand.

The most frequently used consulting approach is to rely on experience and the deliverables previously prepared for somebody else on a different project. This material gets reworked, refreshed, re-presented and re-invoiced. Nothing fundamentally wrong with this as it is part of the value that consultants offer.

At this point in the project the client is impressed. They have a concept deliverable they can review and critique. The relationship is working well. But here’s the problem. The client’s thinking becomes constrained by the tabled deliverable. They start to critique what’s