By Alan Feinberg, entrepreneur and corporate advisor
You won't see any business books advocating his leadership style, but
Niccolo Machiavelli certainly knew a thing or two about change
management when he said that: "There is nothing more difficult to take
in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than
to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
In
Changemaking, Richard Bevan address the difficult, perilous, and
uncertain subject of change management with depth and insight. He has
distilled his years of experience as an executive, consultant, and
educator into a comprehensive guide for the executive who appreciates
that there are no shortcuts or quick fixes when it comes to successfully
leading an organization thorough times of change.
As other reviewers have noted,
Changemaking is chock full of
functional tools, proven methods, and specific techniques that can be
applied to facilitate change. This is a practical workbook that is
meant to be used, not read once and put on a shelf. Explore the
chapters, study the "micro-cases", and modify the nearly 50 resources
(templates, worksheets, processes, guidelines) to suit your needs.
You'll know that you've gotten the most out of this material when your
tattered, dog-eared copy is so full of yellow highlighted paragraphs,
notes in the margins, and coffee stains that you can barely read it.
As an entrepreneur and veteran of multiple Silicon Valley start-ups,
I experienced firsthand the difficulty of managing change, especially
in times of rapid growth (and unfortunately, rapid decline). In
reflecting on the decisions that I've made over the years, I wonder how
much more effective I might have been with a copy of
Changemaking in
hand.
