Page 59 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 3 ■ The transformation perspective
for some but redundancy for others you would expect that to happen. Where
organizations use early retirement or voluntary retirement as an essential part of
policy and where some organizations emphasize the benefits to organization and
employee of subcontracting, maintaining a stable core of permanent employees
and a periphery of subcontractors, they are reflecting a significant change.
Once upon a time managers and professionals and, for that matter, other
employees, particularly skilled employees, expected to stay on one career path
and in one organization throughout their careers. Now people expect careers to
include periods in more than one organization and expect to have more than one
career in a working life.
In general it seems not unreasonable to predict that managers are better edu-
cated, more creative, more ambitious, but less loyal. Indeed survey evidence sug-
gests that this is true in various countries, even in Japan, although the relative
position, particularly on loyalty, is different. I have discussed this view with hun-
dreds of management audiences throughout Europe. All agree that the change is
real. All suggest that this change is a consequence of various social, economic and
technological changes. But all emphasize that loyalty is a two-way process and
that organizations demonstrate less loyalty to their managers, mainly as a conse-
quence of delayering and other major changes which have led to the ‘redundant
executive’ capturing as much if not more of our attention than the redundant
unskilled or semi-skilled worker.
All of this suggests that the statement so often articulated, ‘the most important
resource of this business is its people’, is increasingly meaningful not merely as
rhetoric but also in practice. If we depend more and more on fewer people and if
the loyalty of those people, particularly managers, can no longer be assumed but
rather must be earned and retained, then clearly we need to be concerned about
how we utilize them, develop them and resource them and about the opportuni-
ties for rewards, promotion and success which we provide. If changes depend on
the people who implement them then one must be concerned to ensure that
those people possess the necessary skills. If those same people are motivated by
challenge and opportunity then we must provide that as well. But if the latter will
only follow if changes are successful then the introduction of changes which our

people view as being credible, as likely to succeed, becomes a paramount issue.
Does this not then mean that the task of developing, implementing and manag-
ing major strategic changes becomes a key management challenge of the modern
world? Some say that it must begin with the articulation of strategic vision. You
need to be able to conceive of what the organization might become in three or five
or more years’ time. To do this managers must combine analysis and intuition,
knowing and doing, thinking and feeling. Visualizing strategic change is not merely
a matter of analysis, it requires the ability to think about, to conceptualize, the
future, the willingness to experiment and learn, to see what might happen, to esti-
mate how the organization might respond and much more.
But all of this relates to individual behaviour which will take place in teams,
whether boards of directors, management teams, working parties or whatever.
Thus we need a range of inputs into the discussion and debate on strategy if we
are to understand the social, political, economic and technological trends with
which we must deal, and so we need many inputs perhaps both from inside

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