Janurary Read/4

Title: Successful Organizational Transformation: The Five Critical Elements

Authors: Washington, Marvin; Hacker, Stephen; Hacker, Marla

Call Number: 658.406 W319S 2011

Subjects: Organizational Change; Organizational effectiveness

ISBN: 9781606492116

Number of Pages: 98 pages

Book Description:

This book will walk you through the five ingredients of transformation:

• Vision: Where are you going?
• Leadership: How are you leading the effort, and do you have the skills?
• Technical Plan: How will you close the gap between the vision and your current situation?
• Social Plan: How will you enroll others that might be supportive or not supportive of your plan?
• Burning Platform: Why should you do anything?

At the end of reading this book, you will understand why change efforts fail, what ingredients are needed to ensure success, and what skills are needed at the organizational, group, and individual levels to maximize improvement efforts.( From “Abstract” in the book)

My Read:

            Though there are five elements listed in the book, one of the five truly speaks personally to me: the burning platform. It reminds me of how, why, and when I became a librarian. Contrary to the order of the lists in this book, the burning platform came first to push me away from my back then current situation, out of my comfort zone. The intensity of burning led me to paint pictures (vision) of my future. As the book states: Change can not be managed; it has to be led (p82). Once I was awake, I knew change had to be made.

           “Mentally awake means that a person is awake (consciously) to see connections between effort and outcomes, to see the possibilities to make change happen whenever and wherever.” (p31) I am a person full of curiosity and asking plenty of questions about life. So “Often highly conscious people have more questions than they do answers and it is her job to search for the answers” touches my heart as the words spoke to me as I turned the pages. Asking questions sharpens my sense of existence and paves paths toward possibilities of self-actualization and promises of happiness and a life fraught with fulfillment of meanings and purposes. The answers are not as important as questions for the later leads the way towards lands of satisfaction and joy.

            Talking about values, the following two core values discussed in the book actually are mine and guidelines of my life: who I am, what I do, and how I do it. The two are: 1) making every challenge and risk into an opportunity, 2) being a catalyst for change. Whenever a customer came to the info desk claiming she had a problem my heart raced and the excitement usually occupied me to certain degree that I could almost feel red color making up my face. I hate to waste any opportunity: crises or difficult situations are my training lessons and grounds money couldn’t buy.

            This book is helpful: I appreciate the “Key Takeaways” sessions at the end of each chapter. Those condensed points summarize the essence of the current chapter. If a reader is time-limited and in need of tips those key takeaways will serve the purpose of information delivery. In addition, the final chapter, Conclusion, serves the similar purpose. I would like to read this final chapter again to reflect upon critical elements the authors included in this book.

Reference:

The Strategic Management Collection

www.businessexpertpress.com

Collins, J. (1994). Built to last: Successful habits of visionary companies. New York, NY: Harper Business Essentials.

Kotter, J. (1996). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review 73(2), 59-67.

Kotter, J. (2012). The heart of change: Real life stories of how people change their organizations. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.