Taking Charge Of Change: Ten Principles For Managing People And Performance - Hardcover

Douglas K. Smith is a private consultant who has worked with such corporations as AmEx, Duracell, IBM, and Nabisco. Along with The Wisdom of Teams, his books include Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented Then Ignored the First Personal Computer. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a J.D. from Harvard. He lives in Millbrook, New York.

In business, reengineering is the idiom of the day. Brought to prominence by Michael Hammer and James Champy (Reengineering the Corporation, HarperBusiness, 1993), reengineering calls for an organization to examine itself and its processes. Ironically, whatever the impetus, 70 percent of all reengineering efforts result in failure. In this work, Smith, a management consultant and coauthor of The Wisdom of Teams (LJ 2/1/93), attempts to move reengineering in a more positive direction and provides a syllabus for understanding and implementing a reengineering effort. For Smith, the emphasis is on people and performance. Change is never easy, and the value of the book is in the real situations and examples where change has been attempted, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (lessons can be learned from failure). Aside from being an excellent primer with clearly illustrated models, the last chapter, dealing with personal leadership, is noteworthy. Any organization contemplating a change effort should read this chapter before taking the journey.?Steven Silkunas, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, Philadelphia
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.