Leading Strategic Change Breaking through the Brain Barrier

PROVOCATIVE, PRACTICAL, POWERFUL! Stephen R. Covey, Author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People For any executive, this is an excellent roadmap for leading strategic change! Bill Marriott, Chairman and CEO, Marriott International, Inc. Finally a book that gets it right. Organizations don t change. People change. It Starts with One gives extremely practical tools to make real change happen. Jack Zenger, Author of The Extraordinary Leader and CEO and Co-founder of Zenger Folkman All successful businesses accept the need for change. It Starts with One steers the reader through the complexities of modern leadership and delivers a powerful framework for transforming old patterns of action into new strategic direction, emphasizing what matters most the people. Edward Dolman, CEO, Christie s International plc Black and Gregersen debunk the myth that organizations change by changing the organization. They understand the real dynamics a leader must manage to convert the hearts and minds of people in a complex organization to a new direction. If you are trying to shake things up and make lasting change, this is a must-read book. Gary L. Crittenden, CFO Citigroup This book broke my own brain barrier, asking me to think differently about ideas and processes that I d become too comfortable with. It s a significant contribution to the field of organizational change and will undoubtedly help us be more successful with change. And I love the maps they provoke my intellect and imagination. Margaret J. Wheatley, Author of Leadership and the New Science, Turning to One Another, and Finding Our Way What a pleasure to find a book on change focused on leading rather than managing change. Leaders create change; they don t react to it. This book addresses the crux of that leadership issue by focusing on people, where the real change must occur. Richard D. Hanks, Chairman and President, Mindshare Technologies Few things add greater value than effectively leading strategic change. Few books show you how to do it better than this one. Dave Ulrich, Author of Leadership Brand, Professor of Business, University of Michigan and Partner, The RBL Group (www.rbl.net) A significant barrier to any major change or innovation management process is in transparently defining the past and desired future state, then connecting the move from the former to latter in an inspirational way. It Starts with One offers novel framing and straightforward stepback, targeted thinking that can streamline and turbocharge the challenging change process. David N. DiGiulio, Consultant and former Vice President, Research & Development, Procter & Gamble Leading successful strategic change is one of the biggest and most important challenges executives face today. Black and Gregersen offer a practical set of concepts and tools to meet that challenge. Sue Lee, Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Communications, Suncor Energy Inc. I found this book special in several ways. It is not the usual description of the stages of change. Instead, it describes the process of change in human terms the way people really experience it. They go beneath and look at assumptions (mind maps) that hold people back from being able to change. Jean Broom, Consultant and former Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Itochu International, Inc. Talk about change has far outstripped leaders ability to successfully lead it. Black and Gregersen push the change leaders to explore how they think about or map the world in which we live. These maps become either a critical barrier or an asset to their abilityBlack, J. Stewart is the author of 'Leading Strategic Change Breaking through the Brain Barrier', published 2008 under ISBN 9780132319843 and ISBN 0132319845.