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...evident that today's competitive work environment, change is the norm while steady state is an illusory or, at best, fleeting, temporary state.
The management of quality took a great leap forward when we abandoned our old paradigm of inspecting for quality and replaced it with an effort to build quality in through total quality management (TQM) and other such schemes. Rather than a steady state, quality was viewed as something that could be improved continuously through incremental processes. This same reconceptualization needs to be applied to the change management process.
Recognizing change as a continuous process has implications for the way we manage it. No longer is it appropriate to consider organizational change as a project or event--with a beginning and an end--to be managed. Rather, we must consider change management as an ongoing aspect of the leader's job. What are the implications of this viewpoint for the way we teach change management in our colleges of business and in our continuing professional education programs? How can we refocus to consider change as natural, and therefore an element of our environment to which we must continually adapt? How might we inculcate this view into those we are preparing to lead our organizations in the future? These are a few of the questions that will be examined in this paper.
Five Key Assertions
This paper is built around five key assertions regarding organizational change: (1) The most successful organizations in the long run are those that continuously adapt to changes in the competitive environment. (2) The forces for change in the competitive environment are manifold and continue to build at an accelerating rate. (3) It has become essential to manage change as a continuing process, not as a discrete event or even a series of discrete events. (4) We must adopt a philosophy of "continuous organizational change" to mirror the philosophy that has revolutionized quality management, "continuous quality improvement." (5) A new breed of manager is required who understands change and seeks continuously to adapt the organization to its dynamic environment.
How do we prepare this new breed of managers? Based on our experience as change consultants as well as academic instructors, we offer several ways to address this critical question. Let us examine each of our five assertions.
Assertion One: The most successful organizations in the long run are those that continuously adapt to changes in the competitive environment.
This is not a new idea. In fact, Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) and Schon (1967) were making this point in their seminal writings over three decades ago. The need for organizations to adapt to their competitive environment in order to succeed in the longer term is now a recognized principle in theories of both organizational design (Nystrom & Starbuck, 1981) and strategic management (Guth, 1985). In fact, as Drucker (1954) pointed out years ago, one of the key factors in effective management is the ability to sense environmental change and take steps to position the organization to capitalize on this change.
We teach that it is not enough simply to react to change; instead, the effective manager must anticipate change, or even better, be the creator of change. It is far better to have your competitors scrambling to react to the changes your organization has made than to play follow the leader. These days, the race goes to the swift, and it is the strong who...
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