Breaking the Code of Change
Throughout corporate America, organizational change has become one of the most embraced, yet perhaps the least understood, of all the hot-button issues. Editors Beer and Nohria (Harvard Business Sch.) present a keenly written summary of the findings from their August 1998 conference on change, which featured a diverse group of academics, consultants, and CEOs who have researched, enabled, or led successful corporate-change transformations. The book is organized around debates attended by the conference's "change masters," and the editors present what they perceive as the two main organizational change models in practice today: Theory E (creation of economic value) and Theory O (development of organizational capability). Chapters reveal opposing debates on the purpose of change, leading the change process, and the focus of change, among other topics. A synthesis by a conference moderator follows each debate and is in turn followed by a conference critique and an epilog by the authors indicating what you already could guess: they have not yet broken the "code of change" but have helped better understand organizational change and identify key strategic considerations. Highly recommended for university libraries supporting business curricula.DDale Farris, Groves, TXCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.