Pourquoi certaines entreprises sont prêtes au changement - et d'autres ne le sont pas Michael Jarrett

CHANGEABILITY

Why Some Companies are Ready for Change – and Others Aren’t

By Michael Jarrett

Pearson Education, £24.99

“Change is inevitable,” said Benjamin Disraeli in 1867. “In a progressive country, change is constant.” In his new book, Michael Jarrett puts it another way: “Change is inevitable, like death and taxes.”

And, just as we fear death and taxes, many of us fear change. It disrupts routines and plunges us into uncertainty. We hope that if we hold out for long enough, the need for it will go away and we can carry on as before. This has been all too apparent in the world of finance. The collapse of the subprime mortgage market threatened the profitability of financial services groups, but most responded too late.

But even when companies accept the need for change and set out to achieve it, they often fail. Jarrett, an expert in organisational behaviour at London Business School, believes that 70 per cent of all change management programmes fail.

Why? Jarrett argues that managers often mistake the nature of change. They see it as something logical that can be solved using step-by-step approaches. They are wrong. “There is no simple recipe for organisational change,” he asserts. “There is no silver-bullet strategy, no one simple way that will deliver change.”

Taking wing: a readiness to adapt is vital©Getty

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