 |
The
Dance of Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations |
| by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, Bryan Smith |
|
|
Doubleday/Currency |
| The Dance of Change | |
|
Where did this book come from? After the publication of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge and the other Fieldbook authors (and our growing community of "learning organization" researchers and practitioners) began to hear stories of challenging learning and change initiatives in various corporations. We convened groups of managers and consultants and, based on their experiences and our own, developed the underlying theory of the book: That all efforts to create change in corporations will naturally come up against inhibitions. Leverage comes not from "pushing harder," or "changing faster," but from learning to recognize and redesign the built-in limits that keep change initiatives from growing. |
 |
| What is The Dance of Change? | |
| All organizations that innovate or learn come up against innate challenges that block progress. The harder you push against these challenges, the more they seem to resist. But if you can anticipate them, and build your capabilities for dealing with them, they become opportunities for growth. The Dance of Change is a fieldbook of strategies and methods for moving beyond the first steps of corporate change, and generating long-lasting results. With six authors and more than 100 key contributors, all edited in the concise, down-to-earth style of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, this is an unparalleled compendium, both far-reaching and practical, that addresses the frustrations and opportunities that people in organizations everywhere are facing. Contributors include Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse; well-known management authors Peter Block, Joe Jaworski, and Edgar Schein; the head of General Electric's renowned organizational learning program; and CEOs and managing directors from some of the most prominent companies in the world. | |
| Why now? | |
| Look ahead 20 years. Given the changes expected in technology, biology, medicine, social values, demography, the environment, and international relations, what kind of world might humanity face? No one can say for sure, but one thing is reasonably certain: Continuing challenges will tax our collective abilities to deal with them. Most people in companies and organizations know that they cannot thrive without learning to adapt their attitudes and practices to ever-changing circumstances. But companies that establish change initiatives discover, after initial success, that even the most promising efforts to transform or revitalize organizations-despite interest, resources, and compelling business results - are failing. The time is right for a book that spells out, based on the experience of a growing number of organizations, not just how to initiate change, but how to make it fulfill its promise, over both the short and long term. | |
| Who needs this book? | |
| Learning is the ultimate competitive advantage for organizations - because no one can undercut or take it. But learning is not something that managers can take for granted. It requires ongoing partnership between three types of leaders: Executives at the top of the hierarchy; line leaders with responsibility for the success of particular projects; and internal networkers, who carry the knowledge that the organization needs from one place to another. The Dance of Change can show all three types of leaders, and those who are moving into similar roles, how they can work together, to produce an organization greater than the sum of its parts and achieve the results they care about most. | |
| How can you use this book? | |
| Unlike most anthologies, The Dance of Change is a single unified guide, in which all of these contributors' ideas and solutions are woven together into a single developmental path that can help managers at any level - the shop room floor, the line leader's office, the "network leader's" peripatetic journeys, or the executive suites - develop sustainable long-term learning and change in their organizations. Reading The Dance of Change is like taking part in an interactive experience. You can start at the beginning and go through to the end; but if you prefer, margin icons and cross-references will lead you back and forth among the book's byways and interdependencies. Exercises tested in the field sit next to descriptions of how those exercises worked. First-person "cameos" by industry leaders tell you their story simply and elegantly. Continual "resource" sidebars help you move to further information, either in books or on the World Wide Web. Systems diagrams and explanations help people unravel the complexity of intricate business situations. The generous use of "lexicons" and counterpoints demystify the jargon and insularity of most management books. In this way, The Dance of Change provides an insider's perspective on implementing learning and change initiatives at such corporations as British Petroleum, Chrysler, Dupont, Ford, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Electric, Royal Dutch/Shell, Shell Oil Company, Toyota, the United States Army, and Xerox. Begin with any of the early challenges, and create new capabilities that will carry you forward to any desirable end - even if it means rethinking the purpose of the enterprise. | |
| Photos of The Dance of Change while it was "under construction." |