Two recent blog posts on Harvard Business Review shine a light on the challenges – and opportunities – that change management initiatives face. In his post, Ron Ashkenas, managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and Executive-in-Residence at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley suggests that the greatest area of opportunity is to empower managers to be responsible for implementing and driving change themselves, versus outsourcing it to other departments. It’s a great point. Daniel Markovitz, president of TimeBack Management and the author of A Factory of One, takes this notion a step further in his article by calling out the emotions that the word “change” fundamentally evokes: fear, resistance, failure. He goes on to write, “The real secret to successful change, therefore, is not to change people at all. Let them figure out how to solve their own problems, and they’ll do the rest.”
