The change masters [antikvár]

In today's increasingly uncertain, competitive and fast-moving world, companies must rely more and more on individuals to come up with new ideas, to develop creative responses and push for changes before opportunities disappear or minor irritants turn into catastrophes. Innovations, whether in products, market strategies, technological processes or work practices, are designed not by machines but by people. This book shows how people can exert more leverage in organisations and initiate innovation, thus contributing to their companies' and their own successes. But it is also about the circumstances that make it possible for people to contribute their ideas. The development of "participation management" skills and environments, Rosabeth Kanter argues, provides the key to a corporate renaissance generated from within the organisation itself. The author shows the contrasts between "segmentalist" companies, which are anti-change and tend to have a narrow, compartmentalised perspective on corporate problems, and "integrative" companies, which provide a wide-open, team-oriented environment, in which innovation occurs throughout the organisation, not merely at its top or bottom. Rather than resting on the laurels of past accomplishments, integrative companies look ahead to the challenges of the future. Here are detailed analyses of both the pathways and pitfalls in the search for innovation at some of the most important companies in America, including Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Polaroid, General Motors, Wang Laboratories, and Honeywell. Rosabeth Kanter has looked behind the scenes in these and other firms, and describes their organisational structures, their corporate cultures, and their specific strategies—precisely what they are doing to free the powers of innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit within their own people. The Change Masters vividly demonstrates that when environments and structures are hospitable to innovation, people's natural inventiveness and power skills can make almost anything happen. Professor Ranter's fascinating book is an indispensable guide for individuals who seek to realise their entrepreneurial potential, for executives who want to see their companies grow, and for all those concerned with business ideas and management education. 1 CHAITER Introduction Arnold Toynbee once described the rise and fall of nations in terms of challenge and response. A young nation, he said, is confronted with a challenge for which it finds a successful response. It then grows and prospers. But as time passes, the nature of the challenge changes. And if a nation continues to make the same, once-successful response to the new challenge, it inevitably suffers a decline and eventual failure. As we begin the last two decades of the 20th century, the United States faces such a challenge. —William S. Anderson, Chairman, NCR Corporation In my travels around corporate America, in settings as distant geographically and culturally as a Los Angeles bank's high-rise headquarters, a snow-bordered Minneapolis electronics factory, a dingy Detroit engine plant, a Seattle instrumentation lab sitting among fishing boats, and a New York garment district sportswear showroom, I have been struck by an ever-louder echo of the same question: how to stimulate more innovation, enterprise, and initiative from their people. In every sector, old and new, I hear a renewed recognition of the importance of people, and of the talents and contributions of individuals, to a company's success. People seem to matter in direct proportion to an awareness of corporate crisis. Indeed, only when an organization exists in stable circumstances, when its operations resemble clockwork, unvarying in their practices, can individuals be taken for granted or ignored without peril. Not long ago, when American companies seemed to control the world in which they operated, it was easier to ask the people