Copyright 1996 by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley; 
all rights reserved.

Why Change Doesn't Work

     Acknowledgments

It has been our odd fate that the books we write experience the phenomena the books are about.

The first book we collaborated on, Turf Wars, fell victim to a bloody turf battle when the press that published it was acquired, and all its editors and marketing staff were let go.

Our next title, Why Teams Don't Work, was much more fortunate. It was blessed with the best editing and publishing team we could have hoped for. Our editor was the incomparable founder of Pacesetter Books, Andrea Pedolsky. The publishing team included Martha Kemplin, Carol Cushmore, Bernadette Boylan, Pam Wilkison, Lori Schlesinger, Lenore Greenburg, and later, replacing Lori and Lenore, Lisa Schrager and Mel Elberger.

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No matter who we were dealing with, whether it was editing, design, or promotion, we were always struck by their professionalism, positivism, and involvement. They were always on our side, which is not as common in the publishing world as one might suppose.

How great a team was it? In March 1996, Why Teams Don't Work, in our minds an unassuming addition to the literature of teams, was awarded the Financial Times/Booz-Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award for best management book published in the Americas for 1995. Two unknown, unconnected guys from Minnesota were picked over thousands of other business books for the honor. We were beyond gratified; try flabbergasted.

So now we write a book about change, and darn if the age of change doesn't trip us up. Peterson's was acquired in late 1995 by International Thomson, which studied the company and liked everything it saw except our division, Pacesetter Books, which it disbanded.

So the book now in your hands is the last one our dream team will do together. Andrea we get to take with us, as agent, editor and business partner. The rest of you, farewell and good luck. We wish to thank everyone at Peterson's for their confidence and support over the years, especially publishers Casey and Peter Heggener, and Carol Hupping, who stepped in at the eleventh hour with her excellent editing and authorial hand-holding skills.

Harvey wishes to thank the many people he was worked with in his consulting that provided war stories and other ideas in this book, particularly David Rawles, vice president at GTE Directories, and Lynde Sorensen, director of employee development at Toro.

Mike wishes to thank The Masters Forum, a Minnesota executive education group that he was worked with for several years. Mike helps writes the training materials for these sessions, which keep him up-to-speed on emerging management ideas, which in turn inform projects like this book. Thanks to Jim Ericson, Tom Miller, and Katie Boyle of the Masters Forum for their confidence and support.

Thanks also to fellow ink-stained wretches James Thornton and Gerald de Jaager for their editorial help down the stretch. Books have a way of getting a whole lot better during the hours just before deadline, usually because of the generosity and interest of talented friends like Jim and Jerry.

Thanks to our friends on Ivory Tower, a Minneapolis BBS hosted by the inestimable Topper (Dave Marquette). Our friends there were always generous with their ideas, tips, encouragement and good humor.

Special acknowledgment is due George Osner and Jeff Shepherd, editor and maintainer, respectively, of the Internet's Serial Quotations Mailing List. Every day George and other contributors send out a sheet of fascinating quotations fished from the ocean of world literature. If there is a quote in this book without a proper footnote, we probably obtained it from this excellent source.

Finally, to our families, from parents and our spouses all the way down to our little ones and their animals, our deepest thanks for your patience with the changes we put you all through. x

     Introduction

Think about your own job experiences, and the changes you have been asked to make in the past few years -- TQM, reengineering, restructuring, etc. We're guessing some of these initiatives were modestly successful, a few were total flops, and the rest fell into some vague, plus-minus pile in-between. None quite measured up to expectations, though -- right?

Ambitious undertakings nearly always lead to some degree of disappointment. This fact seems to leave you with three options:

•                     lower your expectations

•                     or dig in your feet and stop changing altogether;

•                     or find better ways to change.

You can lower your expectations without our help. As for the end of change, it may sound like a relief to you now, but if it ever happens to you, you won't like it. So this book is about the last way.

}  ~  }

We live in a period of such rapid organizational change that even the bad old days are starting to look good. It's not just happening to companies whose job is change, the innovators like 3M and Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, who somehow come up with a fresh raft of new product ideas every spring. Plain-vanilla companies that have offered the same product or service for 50 years are caught in the same buzz-saw, because they are expected to change the processes by which they produce the same-old, same-old.

No organization and no industry are exempt. From funeral homes to filling stations to one-person home businesses to huge multinationals with corporate campuses in four continents, all feel the pressure to get with the rhythm and march to the drum.

Why is this happening? Why this sudden explosion of fads, ideas, trends and initiatives? We are obsessed with how to do things better, faster, cheaper, more democratically. Benchmarking, continuous improvement, downsizing, mergers and restructurings, reengineering, reinvention, visioning -- the list of initiatives is stupefyingly long, and many organizations are doing five or six simultaneously.

People and organizations are torn down the middle about this change. On the one hand, we acknowledge that change is a primary reason for existing: learning, growth, progress toward long-term goals.

On the other hand, there is something in our nature that resists changes imposed upon us, even when we know the ideas are good ones. At some peculiar level, we prefer busy-ness to true business; the "good old ways" to continuous improvement.

We hate change because no matter which of three classic responses we make to it, it wins. If we don't embrace it, it overtakes us and hurts like hell. If we do try to embrace it, it still knocks us for a loop. If we try to anticipate it, and be ready when it appears -- well, it doesn't make any difference, we still wind up on our keesters. Change is pain, even when self-administered.

We all know how hard it is to change things about ourselves -- a quality, a habit, or some perceived failing. Think how much harder it must be to move an entire group to a new way -- sometimes a very large group, scattered far and wide, with many different tastes and wishes.

A single rower can easily alter or impede the group's progress simply by resting on the oars. It's the same in organizations. A few people, with no particular malice in their hearts, can prevent good changes from taking place. It is called resistance, or foot-dragging, and it is the veto privilege even the humblest worker can use.

And there are so many things in need of changing. Organizations are anxious to see improvements in a dozen areas at once. Some of these goals are in exquisite tension with one another -- one goal can be achieved only at the other's expense:

•                     making our goods or services cheaper while improving their life expectancy and long-term value; cost versus quality;

•                     eliciting greater efficiency from people while trying to make the workplace a more attractive place to work; numbers versus people;

•                     breaking an organization into smaller, more manageable pieces while seeking to strengthen predictability of the whole; bottom up versus top down.

It's a riddle. And many times we are tripping over paradoxical problems -- early success, high expectations, market rewards.

Change in the last decade became a kind of civil religion for business. We transform, overhaul, reinvent, reenvision, resize, and reengineer. At the same time we don't appear to be achieving anywhere near the success we hoped to experience. What is going on, and is there any way out of these traps?

We think there is. This book looks into the fabric of both individual human nature and group behavior. Our agenda is to tackle change problems in four steps:

•                     First, we get our bearings, understand what we are up against, and what it takes to move people off square one.

•                     Second, we choose a change approach that is doable within the culture of our organization, combining just the right elements of Push and Pull to advance it in the right direction.

•                     Third, we engage individuals on our team or in our organization at the level tha/t works best for each.

•                     Fourth, we examine different kinds of initiatives and anticipate specific problems associates with each.

When you are done you will understand why resistance in groups and teams occurs, and be able to fashion a path away from resistance and toward the kind of good change you originally intended. x

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NOW AVAILABLE from from Berrett-Koehler Publishers (San Francisco) and Texere (UK)!

The New WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK
What Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right

"The American business approach to workplace teams is filled with powerful subtleties and is also quite different from the Japanese. The phrase, "How come all this quality stuff don't work," nicely sums up the challenge making teams work in America. Authors Robbins and Finley present practical solutions to the problems with and misconceptions about teams that will be valuable to any organization inclined to assign teams to work on legitimate operational issues. Pragmatic team tips covered here include team decision-making, communication skills with teams, reward and recognition ideas, the importance of effective team leadership, and the fundamental factor of organizational culture that could help or hinder team success. The authors swap narration of chapters, enlivening this useful handbook on how to make the commitment to teams a success. Serves well any manager's interest in maximizing productivity and quality improvement with teams. Recommended for all quality professionals." -- Quality World

Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995

Why Change Doesn't Work : Why Initiatives Go Wrong and How to Try Again-And Succeed
by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley

"This is the first treatise on change we've seen that is actually entertaining. The authors cover human and organizational barriers to change and change theories, and then take a tour of management theory that's guaranteed to upset every reader at one point or another." -- HR ONLINE

Price: $11.96

Paperback
Published by Peterson's
Publication date: October 1, 1997
ISBN: 1560799447

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Why Change Doesn't Work

by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley

(Pacesetter, 231 pages, $24.95)

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