The Ten Commandments of Change Management

The bad news: change management is ridiculously hard, perhaps the single most difficult task you’ll ever face as a business leader. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most important. In a typical situation, you as a leader will want to transform a highly complex (and inefficient) business model … through a convoluted (and largely undefined) minefield of cultural, technical, and political barriers … to get to a (poorly defined) end state. It’s no wonder most transformation efforts fail to achieve their goals.

The good news: there are a set of change management best practices that you can use to greatly improve your chances for success. Each of these practices is basic in concept (though not always in execution). In OB1, we will introduce these concepts, and during the semester we will explore each in detail.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT

I: Thou shalt develop clear and compelling transformation cornerstone objectives.

You as a leader must know what success will look like and be able to articulate your vision to the organization in the simplest of terms. You must create a compelling shared vision that unambiguously states the urgent benefits of success and the dire consequences of failure. Every single person in your organization, whether they completely understand it or not, needs to share this vision, and be able to articulate it in twenty seconds or less. The foundation of your new business model begins with a set of 1-4 simple cornerstone objectives, value statements that evoke an emotional response; a rallying cry for your change agents, a brand identity for your change campaign.

II: Thou shalt understand the best-practice methods for managing change.

Change management is about instituting a new business model and implementing new processes and business infrastructure—and most crucially, changing the behavior of your workforce. You as a leader must understand the absolutely critical importance of learning the change management process, and...