Thursday, March 27, 2003
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:52:04 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:11:34 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:10:55 PM -
From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda.
[...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable:
The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...]
- Establish a sense of urgency
- Form a powerful guiding coalition
- Create a vision
- Communicate the vision
- Empower others to act on the vision
- Plan for and create short-term wins
- Consolidate improvements
- Institutionalize the change
Kotter's to do: list is remarkably succinct. This could be a manifesto for anybody at work (which reminds me of Gary Hamel's assertion, I think in Leading the Revolution, that we can all be leaders, whatever our station).
[Curiouser and curiouser!] - Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:30:10 PM -
Death by PowerPoint.Edward Tufte:
The 3 reports concerning the possible tile damage on the Columbia prepared by the Boeing engineers have become increasingly important as the investigation has developed. The reports provided the rationale for NASA officials to curtail further research (such as photographing the Columbia with spy cameras) on the tiles during the flight. Here is a close analysis of an important slide from a Boeing report. ... On this single slide, in a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism, fully 6 different levels of hierarchy are used to classify, prioritize, and display 11 simple sentence...Read it all. [via Signal vs Noise]
See also: Faulty epistemology and the loss of the Columbia [Jinn of Quality and Risk]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:23:33 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:13:03 PM -
