The Change Monster : The Human Forces that Fuel or Foil Corporate Transformation and Change

Rating:
Summary: Packed With Knowledge!
Review: Author Jeanie Daniel Duck presents an engaging, personal look at the human emotions, conflicts, fears and anxieties that unite to make change difficult. She describes the five stages of the change process - stagnation, preparation, implementation, determination and, finally, fruition. As she goes in depth about each stage, the author illustrates her explanation with personal examples from her experiences as an organizational consultant. Some of the issues she raises may be familiar to those who have read other books about how to launch change initiatives, but we [...] find that her focus on the human elements of change provides a fresh perspective. The book is directed primarily toward executives, managers or supervisors in charge of leading corporate change, but even if you are already prepared to conquer the change monster, this author's personal touches and stage-by-stage approach will intrigue you.


Rating:
Summary: Comforting
Review: The change monster made me aware of the stages of change in a company: Stagnation,
Preparation, Implementation, and Fruition. Ms Duck seems to be an excellent consultant from the stories I read. The book seems oriented towards Human Resources types as the title suggests. My background is Information Technology consulting, so I found I related too only a few of her stories. I would say her stories were interesting and demonstrated how companies move through change stages arriving at fruition. Ms Duck reminences on her experience and draws important conclusions and abstractions from her experiences. Some of her experiences seemed familar while a larger portion were not as concrete. I could see how large organizations profit from her holositic view of change.

I'm sure her wisdom should not dismissed. I've read Jack Welch's books and reflected on the quantifiable and scientific approach to change and can see objective change can appeal rationally; however, Ms Duck seems to have produced change through insight and dramatic effects a vast range of companies and types. She seems to have a gift for perception and insight into the inner dynamics of the people that make change happen in a company. Duck hand holds her clients through change stages and comforts them by imparting wisdom that allows her client to see a "better way". This "better way" seems to have dynamic impacts on the production of the company. Once the barriers are removed the company matures and reaches fruition.

Rating:
Summary: The Textbook on Human Emotions
Review: The human nature lies in the very base of any organization. That is why organizations, including business ones, tend to behave like humans. Along their lives they pass through different stages, like stagnation, understanding the necessity of change, the transformation and either back to the stagnation or upward to the new level of consciousness or efficiency. However, very few books on the market consider the transformation process from the "human" point of view. That is from the prospective of human emotions. Ms. Duck is to be sincerely thanked for the attempt to close the gap.

The book shows that the emotions do really matter in the process of changes, and can easily abrupt the transformation, as well as make it successful. Interestingly, many consultants yet fail to recognize this obvious fact and prefer to deal with charts rather then with people and their complicated behavior. The author points out that the process of changes is somewhat constant to any business structure in the modern world - another conventional truth, which is often forgotten by CEOs and business leaders.

Meanwhile, the book fails to show how particular managing techniques help to resolve emotional problems on each stage of transformation. The examples from "real life" are somewhat chaotic and case studies are not well organized around the central idea (if there is any?). It is not clear what is the point of each particular story, including the glimpses of the author's biography in the beginning of some chapters and the end of the book.

That is why I would consider the book "a textbook", rather than "a manual" which can give you a systemic view on transformation and a set tools to deal with the process. For these purposes a reader is kindly advised to address to "Creative Destruction", a book written by direct competitors of Jeanie Duck - two McKinsey consultants. The other point of concern is that the author overemphasizes the role of an external consultant. Such an approach depreciates the value of the expertise brought into the book and gives an impression that Ms. Duck's judgments are biased ("you tend to fail if you don't follow a consultant's advice", the book's bottomline).

Rating:
Summary: Good book, would have been a better article...
Review: This is a good book on leading change and the effect of change on people (and, in turn, the effect of people on the change initiative). However, it doesn't measure up to Kotter's "Leading Change," Ulrich, Zenger, and Smallwood's "Results-Based Leadership," or Fogg's "Implementing Your Strategic Plan." The problem is that the book really makes you work to mine the little "nuggets" of wisdom that it contains. Essentially, this book is a large case-study of Honeywell's Micro Switch subsidiary. Buried deep within the case study are the management principles that we're all reading the book to discover. I'm not saying that the book isn't well-written and worth the time to read; rather, I'm saying that it isn't easy. I would have preferred some quote-boxes or other graphics that highlighted the necessary information. Perhaps two or three chapters in the beginning that detail the change process and the book's fundamental management principles. In the end, I think this book would have been a fantastic article in Harvard Business Review. However, as a book, it just takes too long to get to the point. Overall grade: B-/B.