Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout

by Eric Abrahamson

Book Overview

Outlining a positive approach to change called creative recombination, this title identifies five key elements that every company has - people, structures, culture, processes, and networks. It offers... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157851827X
• ISBN13: 9781578518272
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Clarity and Common Sense

As someone who has worked in both the public and private sectors (for a number of years heading my own business), I found Abrahamson's book to be a breath of fresh air. He provides a clear, non-dogmatic approach to management that is rooted in real-life situations and behavior. His clear and accessible writing style helped to give this reader the insights needed to effectively analyze management situations and envision their solution. This is a useful and accessible piece of work.

Fresh perspective

It's my job to be familiar with change methodologies. So I approached this book with the thought of "not another change model". But I was quickly drawn into Eric Abrahamson fresh perspective on change. Like him, I have experiences in which a recombinant method would have produced long-term organisational improvement. This book is a good read for every practioner who has to have several ideas up his or her sleeve at all times.

A good eye opener

This book was a complete eye opener. It really presents a completely different take on the topic of managing change. In addition, its full of rich examples, of practical advice and tools that I can put into action. Good stuff for my business.Also, found the web site for the book www.ChangeWithoutPain.com; although it is under construction..., is also quite useful.

Finally, something we can use

Finally some good old common sense about how to manage change - but common sense is so bloody uncommon. The approach in this book is so compelling because it is how most of us manage change successfully day to day. Not by bringing in expensive consultants to rip everything apart and start over. But rather, by finding what we are good at and leveraging our strength to make things happen. We were doing it all along, we just did not have a name for it, a way to think about it, and a set of techniques to systematize it.

A controversial approach to change

Finally a management book that will create a little controversy. Change Without Pain criticizes subtly, but unabashedly, the advocates of big, destructive, revolutionary change. Authors like Garry Hammel, Leading the Revolution, or Sarah Kaplan and Richard Foster, Creative Destruction. Remember, Hammel is the guru, and Kaplan and Foster, the McKinsey consultants, who held up Enron in their books as a model of revolutionary change. For my money, Change Without Pain, is worth reading for two reason. Firstly, the book introduces a completely different and novel approach to change. An approach that turns almost everything written about change management on its head. The book is not the final say. It is a start, however, in a very promising direction that others will have to follow up on.Secondly, the book is worth reading because it provides a long overdue "poke in the eye" of a small group of gurus and consultants. Advice givers like Kotter, Hammel, Kaplan and Foster whom advocated the most disrupting approach to change with little regard to the risk to companies, the financial cost to shareholders, and the human tole placed on employees executing these changes. You can be certain of one thing, this book is going to challenge, annoy, and even infuriate the change-management establishment.