Many years ago, I had been doing a lot of project management. I had been watching huge, strategically-important projects march through every single milestone on-time and on-scope – and then flop when they launched. The end-users would collectively shrug, put the launch announcement and training materials on the corner of their desk and forget about them while they disappeared under piles of other announcements and training materials.

Meh.

This made me curious. What could we do differently to avoid wasting time and money and effort – and the opportunity costs of sales – and loss of whatever we were trying to accomplish with that project. I started reading articles and books.

Finally I came across this book.

How could I not read it, with a title like that?

Even people who are nominally in charge can’t get things accomplished. How many times have you heard a CEO declare that the company is going to do XYZ but the employees or the customers don’t buy in?

Perhaps, say, the CEO declares that the company that has been afraid of allowing employees to use their personal social media accounts on the company’s behalf would, henceforth, embrace it, with employees posting on the FB daily and etc. Three months later, fewer than 3% of employees participate. Get focused, the CEO says, I want 100% by the end of the month. And compliance drops to 2%.

The title of the book appealed to me because I was definitely not in charge at that point. (And then I went through a “there goes my team, I must follow them, for I am their leader”¹ phase.) So the title appealed.

I read the book.

And then I did something I had never done up to that point, after all those years of reading.

I wrote to the author.

I think I called the publisher and asked how to get in touch with him. And I wrote him a letter that went something like, “I loved your book. What is this, this thing you were writing about? Does it have a name? Can I get a graduate degree in it?”

His answer (to paraphrase) went: “Thank you. It’s called Organizational Change Management. There is one program in the U.S.” and it turned out to be about four blocks south of my office. I went back to school, earned a graduate degree in Organizational Change Management, and started putting it to work at once.² Once I got the hang of it, it changed how I managed internal communications and how I led projects, and even how I approached event management.

When I got tired of working for a large, mature organization that was afraid to change³, I left and micro-dosed myself with change management by starting a change management program at a consulting company and advising clients on using change management in implementations of WFM applications.

My latest focus has been on infusing strategy and project management with change management.⁴

It’s been a number of years since I discovered this book and my career has been on a tremendous journey since I first read it. Even as a VP of Strategy, I still feel like I am not in charge, and I am still helping people figure out how to get things done, and I am still watching Senior Leaders declare that Change. Will. Happen. and waiting for that to work.⁵

To be honest, I’m surprised that I got all the way to September 13 without writing about this book. How could I not have written about it sooner? I must have written about it sooner….

If you’re not in charge⁶, and you’re trying to get things done, give this book a try.

But beware, oh, beware.

You might get hooked on change management.

And then your life might change.

1. Gandhi. ↩︎
2. Although I couldn’t call it OCM because then the VP of HR would have wanted it to be in her area, and she would have told me I was doing it wrong, and she would have taken it away from me. So I called it Communications or sometimes Project Management or Operations. But we were doing OCM. ↩︎
3. Under new ownership now and doing great! ↩︎
4. Book pending. ↩︎
5. But not too loudly because they deserve sympathy. ↩︎
6. Or even if you are? ↩︎