Change Management and Leadership - The empirical case of Solvay Specialty Polymers

People who have been through difficult, painful, and not very successful change efforts often end up drawing both pessimistic and angry conclusions. Available evidence shows that most public and private organizations can be significantly improved, at an acceptable cost, but that they often make terrible mistakes when they try it because history has simply not prepared them for transformational challenges. Therefore, people of some generation ago did not grow up in an era when fast-transformation was common. With less global competition and a slower-moving business environment, the norm back then was stability and the ruling motto was: “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” For instance, if you had told a typical group of managers in 1960 that business people today, over the course of eighteen to thirty-six months, would be trying to increase productivity by 20 to 50 percent, improve quality by 30 to 100 and so on, they would have laughed at you. The challenges we face now are different. A globalized economy is creating both more hazards and more opportunities for everyone, forcing firms to make dramatic improvements no only to compete and prosper but also to merely survive. Globalization, in turn, is being driven by a broad and powerful set of forces associated with technological change, international economic integration, domestic market maturation within the more developed countries, and the collapse of worldwide communism. No one is immune to these forces. The problem now is that most managers have no history or legacy to guide them through all this. Some people have concluded that organizations are simply unable to change much and that we must learn to accept that fact. But this assessment cannot account for any of the dramatic transformation success stories from the recent past. Some organizations have discovered how to make new strategies, acquisitions, reengineering, quality programs, and restructuring work wonderfully well for them. They have minimized the change errors and, in the process, they have been saved from bankruptcy, gone from middle-of-the-pack players to industry leaders, or pulled farther out in front of their closest rivals