Book
Achieved Failure
An organization can complete a change program faithfully, report it as a success, and change nothing.
The reason is not incompetence. It is built into how the work was governed, and that is what this book is about.
A finding from 1990, and a number that was never tested.
In 1990, three researchers spent four years inside six corporations and concluded that formal change programs were frequently the greatest obstacle to the change they had been created to produce. The finding was published in one of the most widely read business journals in the world. It has been available, in print, for thirty-five years.
Seventy per cent of organizational change initiatives fail. It has never been established. Traced back far enough it becomes an estimate, offered without measurement, and then thirty years of citation.
This book is not about that finding. It is about why knowing it has not helped.
Two sections. Thirteen chapters.
- Chapter 1
Northlake
You watch it happen.
- Chapter 2
The Machinery Beneath
Why it happens, and why it is invisible.
- Chapter 3
Northlake, Three Years Later
The same company, a different outcome, and what it cost.
- Chapters 4 to 13
The practice
Four acts and three conditions that interrupt achieved failure, an interlude, and two closing chapters.
Strategic workforce planning
Applying the principles to future workforce decisions. Details to come.