Our Iceberg is Melting
by John Kotter
An absorbing fable that illustrates John Kotter’s eight step change management process using a colony of penguins.
One day, an observant penguin discovers a serious problem that has profound implications for the survival of the colony. The iceberg they call home is melting. The book follows the story of how t he penguins digest this information, how they organize themselves and how they overcome the naysayers, the resistance to change.
This is a great book to hand out to your first line managers and front line staff in advance of a major transformation. Highly recommended.
Communicating Change
by TJ Larkin and Sandar Larkin
Addresses a critical driver of the success of Business Transformation: communication.
The book presents three keys to effective communication. Firstly, a transformation program must target the first line managers, or supervisor. Secondly, it must communicate personally on a face-to-face basis. Finally, the content of the communications must be relevant to each local workplace and not just to the overall enterprise.
The book challenges the traditional approach to filtering messages through the organization hierarchy.
The Process Edge
by Peter Keen
Just when we thought we had read enough books on business process re-engineering, Peter Keen provides a different perspective.
Key to process success is ensuring that executives know which are the critical processes that provide most value and then focussing on those processes. This work ties in well with Michael Porter’s work on the value chain which also provides a perspective on identifying the organization’s core processes.
Peter Keen provides a good framework for assessing processes strategically.
Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture
by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn
A practical guide to understanding an organization’s culture and introducing interventions to initial change. The book presents a good framework for assessing culture although it should be remembered that there are frameworks by other authors that provide different models for organizational culture. The book provides an assessment methodology that can be easily administered in your organization.
A refreshing change from the tomes of theoretical works written on the subject.
The Goal
by Eliyahu Goldratt
A classic book on process improvement. The book tells the story of a manager’s journey to improve the performance of his manufacturing plant. Success means the avoidance of imminent closure. The story is used to outline the key tenets of Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, a process improvement methodology.
The book is an absorbing read particularly for those of us that likes good fiction.
