The Change Catalyst, Secrets to Successful and Sustainable Business Change reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Change Catalyst, Secrets to Successful and Sustainable Business Change by  Campbell Macpherson available from Amazon here.

88% of change initiatives fail. The Change Catalyst provides you with the insight, tools and know-how you need to make sure your next change, strategy or M&A is the one in eight that succeeds.

Whether you’re trying to change a process, a culture, a behaviour or an entire business, success demands complete clarity of what you are trying to achieve and why, followed by a clear plan to align your people to deliver. All change is about people, and one of the most important ingredients for successful change is the identification and appointment of a Change Catalyst. This is the person who can guide your organisation – its people and its processes – to the ultimate delivery of the outcomes your business needs.

As MacPherson points out a number of times throughout his book, change within organisations is rarely managed successfully. However after a clear outline of many of the reasons why change initiatives fail he acknowledges that it will be a very short book if he doesn’t set to work to try and provide some tips for avoiding these pitfalls.  From here on it is a useful and interesting read, with some mostly good case studies illustrating how some organisations successfully avoided failure while trying to implement change. The challenge for large organisations will always remain the heavy weight of inertia, and conservatism when it comes to implementing change. All the trickier too, when there is no one right blue print for what is the right option for your own particular multinational organisation.

It’s a good book, well researched, will a clear instruction to use it as a guide and a resource to assess what is the right option for your own organisation. In part 3, he invokes the famous quote by Peter Drucker ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ as this remains the perennial challenge, namely, what is your organisation’s culture, will it enable you to achieve the change you are looking for, and if not, how on earth are you going to change that culture!

Here are his thoughts from 2012

Change is a tough challenge, the stats say that you will struggle to succeed, this book might just help increase the odds in your favour.

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