Management Challenges for the 21st Century

3 The Change Leader

One Cannot Manage Change • Change Policies • Organized Improvement • Exploiting Success • Creating Change • Windows of Opportunity • What Not to Do • Piloting • The Change Leader’s Two Budgets • Change and Continuity • Making the Future

Introduction

One Cannot Manage Change

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

We do not hear much anymore about “overcoming resistance to change,” which ten or fifteen years ago was one of the most popular topics of management books and management seminars. Everybody has accepted by now that “change is unavoidable.” But this still implies that change is like “death and taxes”: It should be postponed as long as possible, and no change would be vastly preferable.

But in ...