Page 120 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Conclusion
For what it’s worth, this seems helpful but we should beware seeking to be too
precise. Overall it seems possible to argue that a balanced approach may be more
likely to deliver significant changes, which in turn deliver competitive advantage
by ‘changing the rules of the game’. This implies integration as a key determinant
of success in breakthrough change. That, in turn, implies a degree of concurrent
engineering in what we call ‘the change architecture’ – see Chapter 14. However,
that does not always mean radical change in any particular field. In principle the
notion of integrated change could be taken to be the pursuit of advantage by the
simultaneous adoption of incremental changes to product, organization quality,
service, etc. However, within that any particular element may be subject to break-
through change, made easier if the change architecture allows for prototyping,
simulations and so on and also if the technology and other capabilities needed for
that breakthrough are readily available.
This is not very different from the ideas D’Aveni (1994) offers for the hyper-
competitive firm which requires multiple moves to escalate the cost/challenge to
imitators. But crucially he argues that in a more volatile environment it is crucial
to seize the competitive high ground in a series of small steps – small steps, mul-
tiple moves, simultaneous change, integration. The conceptual territory exam-
ined clearly overlaps.

Conclusion

This chapter dealt with breakthrough or radical change by looking at the overlap
between strategic management thinkers, in particular those who follow the
resource-based view of strategy and the field of change management. This enabled
us to offer two important dimensions for successful change programmes, connec-
tivity and leverage.
We examined what we mean by radical or ambitious change programme and
identified various characteristics of radical change. Clearly mental models, new
rules of the game and the implementation index are important here. But per-
haps also the GE market leadership rule provides a helpful guide to those seek-
ing to go for radical change alongside ideas such as scaleability, the accelerator

effect and the notions of deftness in project teams, distinctive value and effi-
ciency and the disproportionate allocation of resources. These, to some extent,
may be necessary features for success in radical change rather than simply a
means of judging the degree of ambition, but they do at least give us some
ideas for judging and working with the level of ambition in any given change
programme.
We looked at the idea of integration as a component of successful break through
or radical change, which led us to note that a key component may be the ability to
adopt incremental or radical changes in each element of a business. Success goes to
those who can create advantage not least by ‘raising their own game’ and disrupt-
ing their opponents by doing so. Integration in radical change becomes the ability
to put these simultaneous changes together. Thus the question about ambition and
change becomes quite complex. It is not an absolute – in effect we refer to ambition
as compared to our competitors.

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