Change Management News

A part of American history that even sleepy fifth graders (and their parents) know is that Paul Revere rode to warn people that “the British are coming.” But not so many know that William Dawes rode that night in 1775. In fact, he rode further and warned more people. So why didn’t Longfellow write a poem about him?

Some speculate that Revere was more connected. He knew people. He served on committees. And the people he warned were influential leaders like Sam Adams. Revere left a written first-person account. He liked to talk. And he lived in Boston, whereas Dawes moved out of town.

So what’s this got to do with change management, I hear you mutter. Read the rest of this entry »

Shankar Vedandam has written another fine piece in The Washington Post. Learning from Goalies  I keep finding great lessons about change management in his Department of Human Behavior column.

When faced with crisis (i.e. financial meltdown, competition eating us for lunch, etc) we tend to have a bias toward action. It is as if we believe that doing something is better than just standing there. It’s as if the research suggests just the opposite: don’t just do something — stand there. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Mickelson (www.icollabora.com) sent me two fascinating articles about similar research to what I covered in The Right Frame of Mind.

The first suggests that just talking about something — say a recession, for instance — influences how we think about it. The link between Social Security numbers and product prices is downright scary. Social Security Numbers and Prices

This link discusses the price of wine experiment. Price of Wine

The portion of Brian Buck’s blog that focuses on Lean Production has some valuable information. Lean Production

The rest of his blog maybe fine as well, I just read the Lean section.

According to The Economist, Ara Norenzayan “conducted experiments using what is known as the dictator game. . . .Participants receive a sum of money – Dr. Norenzayan set it at $10 – and are asked if they would like to share it with another player.” In the basic version of this old game, people tend to keep most of the money for themselves. He “tweaked the game by introducing the idea of God.” Half the subjects unscrambled sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine and so forth prior to playing the dictator game. The players who were primed with so-called religious terms gave $4.22 on average whereas other players left $1.84. (The Economist March 22, 2008.)

The Economist asked an interesting question. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Pearlstein’s “A Sacred Cow in the Cockpit” raises some interesting questions about resistance to change in his Washington Post column. Just why do pilot’s ignore the writing on the wall that suggests that the airline industry is hemorrhaging money and the old way of doing business doesn’t cut it?. (That’s my phrase, not his.) Pearlstein said, “But there is no getting around the fact that the airlines also suffer from unions that, 30 years on, still haven’t accepted the reality of a deregulated marketplace. . .” he is especially harsh when it comes to seniority. It causes airlines to work in ways that are “ irrational or unproductive.” Read the rest of this entry »

In Corey Smith’s blog, Master the Business,
he asks why change often doesn’t achieve significant ROI. Here was my response to him:

Corey - I love your phrase “change forsaken.” That’s priceless.

I found a number of reasons why change fails to earn significant ROI. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read a post on Dan Tocchini’s blog titled “People Are Always Motivated. It is worth reading.
 http://dantocchini.com/?p=31

A friend told me that he’d seen where it was even more effective to promise to give the money to someone you didn’t like if you didn’t meet your goals. I can see how that could work really well. In fact, I can think of someone right now who probably could help me meet my goals!

David Brooks’ column written in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal is a fascinating look at people in power. Here’s what he says of people who are high achievers: “they have all of the social skills required to improve their social rank, but none of the social skills that lead to genuine bonding. They are good at vertical relationships with mentors and bosses, but bad at horizontal relationships with friends and lovers.”

I think the column is well worth your time. David Brooks

This appeared in my newsletter, Tools for a Change, earlier this week.

Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale, found that people are more likely to act in their own self-interest if they sign a contract. And - they are significantly more likely to meet their goals if they could lose something of value if they failed. Karlan and some colleagues ran an experiment where people who wanted to quit smoking signed an agreement that they would lose money if they failed a urine test the end of the experiment. . . . Those who signed the commitment paper were about 30 percent more likely to pass the test than the control group or a group that just received educational materials. The lesson: Many of us work harder to avoid losing than to gain something. Read the rest of this entry »