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From the experiences of dozens skilled at making change happen, we've compiled a handbook -- 10 Laws of Change that you can use to gauge your development as a change agent in an era of total change.

You need all five of these critical factors to deliver sustainable growth to your company

10 yrs ago, Peter Senge introduced the idea of the "learning organization." In this interview he updates that idea focusing on obstacles to change and discusses the current "company as a machine" mentality and the more realistic "companies as living organisms" model. Other topics discussed include: initiate change by starting small; change through personal growth; definition of leadership; self-reinforcing factors and 10 "challenges of change."

excerpts from Chapter 10 of the book, 'Shaping the Adaptive Organization: Landscapes, Learning and Leadership in Volatile Times' offers 10 activities that leaders of organizations can emphasize to help shape a coherent environment that can handle constant and significant change and thereby achieve breakthroughs.

You know the sort: They operate deep within big companies, well beneath the cultural radar, and are practically invisible to the top brass. Employing many different styles and strategies, typically waging small battles rather than epic wars, they work slowly to change the rules.

Every three months, 60 executives responsible for moving their companies into the Internet Economy gather to discuss challenges and frustrations. This group offers a remarkable window into what it takes to transform a big company into a Net company.

"Technology change management is not an isolated activity but a process that touches many of the socio-technical activities at work in an organization. This bigger picture of technology change management includes business and work processes and technical systems as well as processes related to group dynamics and collaboration. The connection is clear. When we ask people to change how they do their work, as we do in improvement or technology adoption efforts, we are asking them to learn. If you pay attention to how people learn, you will be capable of more effective change management. Learning and technology change management reinforce one another. If you are smart about how you manage change, you will help make your workplace a learning organization, and that will pay off in many ways."

In June, 1998, almost nothing at Seagate was going right. After years in which Seagate had enjoyed comfortable technical leadership in drives for high-performance computers, competitors including IBM and Quantum were catching up. The volume part of the business, hard disks for personal computers, was overloaded with production capacity and glutted with inventory. The largest customers, the computer makers, were demanding not only more storage per dollar--nothing new about that--but also more service, including caches of completed drives near their assembly operations. But Seagate seemed unable to respond expeditiously.

Something had to change--fast. Craig Nichols, an E&Y partner, suggested it was time to go further and "transform the whole operations side of their business." What Nichols was proposing was a DesignShop, a concept (and trademarked name) developed and worked out by Matt Taylor, an architect, and his wife, Gail, an educator. Their idea is to push--some would say shock--a group to leave behind the conventional and instead collaborate creatively on a new product design, a new process, the solution to a business problem, or even a completely new business strategy.

James Collins, author of Built to Last, discusses his research into companies that went from good to great (admittedly a small sample size) in this interview with InformationWeek.

A good look at why people resist change, drawing largely from the book "Managing at the Speed of Change" by Daryl R. Conner. Offers more insight on why people resist change than on how to counter the resistance.

A summary of key points found in the book 'Change Is the Rule
Practical Actions for Change: On Target, On Time, On Budget' by Winford E. "Dutch" Holland, Ph.D.

Unless we fully understand the theory or thinking that we held true when we created practices and procedures that we use presently, we will be forever condemned to create different versions of what we have always done.

Considering a major change? Identify potential problem areas first with this quick assessment.

This article identifies six renegade roles that fall evenly into two categories: (1) Reactive Renegades, and (2) Proactive Renegades. The Reactive Renegade roles include: The Detective, The Instigator, and The Reactor. The Proactive Renegade roles include: The Visionary, The Architect, and The Builder. In case after case experience has shown that while one individual could play more than one renegade role, the success stories resulted from the collaboration of multiple people encompassing at least all three roles within each category. In other words a reactionary change requires The Detective, The Messenger, and The Reactor. Proactive changes require The Visionary, The Designer, and The Builder.

While change management depends on leadership to be enacted, to date there has been little integration of these two bodies of literature. The key role leaders play in the change process has been noted by change theorists, yet there is no conclusive research that focuses on this relationship between leadership and change. Recent theoretical research has attempted to integrate change as a contextual variable influencing transformational leadership. Such research focuses on determining when organizations will be more receptive to transformational leadership and the match between receptivity level and the actual transformational leadership process. However, this research does not address the issue of the capabilities of transformational leaders required to carry out the pertinent change process. Thus, the purpose of this article is to draw parallels between the change literature and the leadership literature; specifically, the transformational leadership literature that is primarily concerned with the capabilities required to enact change successfully. First, we will describe the latest literature relating to change management. Next, we will review theories of change oriented leadership. Finally, we will integrate these literatures and link them to the articles that comprise this special issue.

How often do we make false assumptions about other people based on our own culture and experiences? And even more importantly, how often do we fail to recognise and understand how individuals deal with grief and change in their personal lives or at work.

Magnitude of organizational change ranges from minimal change or maintaining status quo to revolutionary enterprise-wide re-engineering. This magnitude of change is a function of the vehicle used to drive the change. It is important to understand the capabilities of various vehicles and use the most appropriate one for the desired level of change. Our research indicates that maintaining status quo or seeking revolutionary enterprise-wide re-engineering are not healthy options for an organization. We find that organizations that embrace evolutionary change through process improvement and process (re)design achieve sustainable change. The most common vehicles for driving this sustainable change in ascending order of magnitude of change are Data Analysis, Process analysis, System Assessment and Customer Feedback.

This article takes a look at the psychological factors affecting people's reactions to change and implications and suggestions for implementing organizational changes.

Many corporate change efforts are greeted with rolling eyes from employees. Harvard Business School professors David Garvin and Rosabeth Moss Kanter help identify the keys to a successful company transformation.

Resistance is a natural part of change. It protects people from harm. Resistance is not the primary reason why changes fail. It is often the reaction to resistance that creates the problems.

Many leaders think transitions will occur automatically during a change process. But the secret to successful change may lie in how well leaders manage periods of transition.

Bill Howes, CEO of Inland Paperboard and Packaging, believes that, given the right environment, ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things - even in a stubbornly cyclical industry. He's on his way to achieving this vision - and it all began with a story.

"Getting people and organizations to accept new ways of doing things is typically described as 'managing change' and assigned as an afterthought to a handful of specialists from the human resources department. Not surprisingly, this approach frequently ends in disaster. 'Managing change' is far too flat and insipid a description of what needs to be done. Change doesn't just have to be managed; it needs to be sold to the people in the company. It's ironic that even businesses that excel at persuading customers to buy and use their products never think of targeting those same skills at their own employees. Business-technology executives and sponsors of major projects aimed at transforming the way things are done need to adapt the tools and techniques--and even the budgets--of consumer marketing to their internal initiatives. They need to use the principles of marketing internally in the same way that they're used to sell outside the company."

Despite all that we've heard about the role of strong leadership, Professor Kassarjian bursts the bubble by describing how real change originates with front line managers. Read about the real truths of change and how you must reshape your leadership style and role to foster change.

Find 'Follow-up Thoughts On Issues Posed By The Article' at:
http://www.babsoninsight.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php?id=255

How closely related are organizational learning and indoctrination? This Harvard Business Review interview with one of the founding fathers of the field of organizational psychology, Ed Schein, reveals the darker side of organizational learning.

Have you ever tried to change someone else's behavior, or even your own, with no success? Are you evaluating the behavior from a cause and effect viewpoint? Try using the A-B-C method (Antecedents-Behavior-Consequences)

This excellent article starts by examining empirically founded communications principles that taken together can constitute a communications strategy and then applies that strategy to the Kurt Lewinian model of change (three stages: unfreezing, changing or moving, and refreezing).

How do you develop strategy in an uncertain economy? Meet TINA: There Is No Alternative. First, Royal Dutch/Shell pioneered the system of scenario planning to anticipate dramatic changes in the world. But when everything starts to change, the way to do planning is to focus on things that don't change.

The landscape of organizational life suggests change has become a way of life. Change has also changed. Change is continuous and discontinuous. Change is accelerating. This article presents a number of change failure themes. Their avoidance may serve to prevent an organization's change process from ending up in the "change effort graveyard."