Built To Change:How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness

In the 1980s, the best-known management book was In Search of Excellence. It identified a number of companies that were excellent performers. But by the 1990s, many of them had ceased to be excellent performers. It was not that they had lost the ability to do what they had done; it was simply that what they had done no longer fit the demands of the business environment.

In the 1990s, the leading book on organizational excellence wasBuilt to Last. Many of the companies listed as “built-to-last” companies are still performing well, but a significant number are not, including Ford, Motorola, Sony, Walt Disney, and Boeing. In fact, about half of the Built to Last companies have struggled in the past decade.

As the rate of change in the business environment continues to increase, the premium on organizations being able to change is getting ever larger. But why do organizational change efforts so often fail?

Many organizational change projects are doomed to fail from the beginning because the internal barriers to change are so strong. In Built to Change, Edward E. Lawler III and Christopher G. Worley demonstrate that the only way to assure that organizations will be able to change is to design them to change, to create organizations that loveto change.

Lawler is Distinguished Professor of Business and Director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. He has consulted with more than 100 organizations on employee involvement, organizational change, and compensation. He has also written 35 books, includingRewarding Excellence, Organizing for High Performance, Treat People Right, andHuman Resources Business Process Outsourcing.

Worley is Director of the Master of Science in Organization program at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. His consulting clients include Microsoft, British Petroleum, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He is the author of Integrated Strategic Change and Organization Development and Change.

In our summary of Built to Change, you’ll learn how to adopt the practices and designs that can help you to achieve and sustain excellence through the ability to change.