個案總覽

Most organizations must change if they're to stay alive. Change is tough to accomplish, but it's not impossible and can be systematized. The author, who has been involved in change initiatives at scores of companies, believes that the success of such programs has more to do with execution than with conceptualization. The successful change programs he observed had one thing in common: They employed three distinct but linked campaigns--political, marketing, and military. A political campaign creates a coalition strong enough to support and guide the initiative. A marketing campaign must go beyond simply publicizing the initiative's benefits. It focuses on listening to ideas that bubble up from the field as well as on working with lead customers to design the initiative. A clearly articulated theme for the transformation program must also be developed. A military campaign deploys executives' scarce resources of attention and time. Successful executives launch all three campaigns simultaneously. The three always feed on one another, and if any one campaign is not properly implemented, the change initiative is bound to fail.

Managers are right to break down the boundaries that make organizations rigid and unresponsive. But once the traditional boundaries of hierarchy, function, and geography disappear, a new set of boundaries becomes important. These new boundaries are psychological rather than tangible and they reflect the dimensions of authority, task identification, politics, and personal identity encountered by all employees in any company.