Change Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Change Rosabeth Moss Kanter Change Management Organisations Must Change and Change quickly INTRODUCTION Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the professor in business at Harvard Business School, where she holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship. She is known for her classic 1977 study of Tokenism. As a business leader and expert on strategy and leadership for change, she was nominated as the top ten on the list of the â€Å"50 most influential business thinkers in the world†, and she is on the list of the â€Å"100 most important women in America† and the â€Å"50 most powerful women in the world†. Her main concepts include changing organisations, bureaucracy and characteristics of resistance to change. (drfd.hbs.edu, 2007) In 1989, she argues that: â€Å" today’s corporate elephants must learn how to dance as nimbly and speedily as mice â€Å". (Burnes, 2004) In other words, she points out that big organisations should change and change quickly to meet the changing environment. This repo rt is going to analyse the key drivers for this statement and find out the reason behind change. This report contains three sections. Section 1 will give definitions to change management and the importance of change. Section 2 is discussions, which is divided into two sub-categories, first part is concerned with the models of change management, and part 2 goes on to show examples of how big organisations keep up with change and the possibilities of failure. This section contains examples of big organisations successfully changed to meet their goals and objectives, while some other organisations stay the same and fail to maintain their strong market position. Section 3 is conclusions. CHANGE MANAGEMENT â€Å" Today’s corporate elephants must learn how to dance as nimbly and speedily as mice if they are to survive in our increasingly competitive and rapidly changing world† (Burnes, 2004) According to Paton it is no surprise that change is also a fact of life within huma n systems. Recent developments in the global economy have catapulted this fact to the forefront of management concerns as well. Therefore, even though Professor Kanter’s statement was mentioned about 18 years ago, it is still valued today. Additionally, Kanter (1989) mentioned that in order for organisations to change, it requires faster action, more flexibility and closer partnerships with employees and customers than typical in the traditional corporate bureaucracy. To quote from her, â€Å"Corporate giants, in short, must learn how to dance†. Therefore, the â€Å" corporate elephants † represents big companies while â€Å" mice â€Å", on the other hand, represents small firms. To summarise her statement above, we could conclude that small firms are more flexible in changing compare with big organisations, because big organisations have more management levels and more bureaucracy; therefore, corporate giants should adapt this ability to change and change qu ickly. More over, the most important reason for organisations to change, is to keep pace with the ever changing business environment and give a good company image to the public that they are keep up dating themselves and stay competitive.