Reflections on Organizational Change

Speaker A If I look back and say another reflection about this work, it's really organization, and how you reorganized for effectiveness, I think is very important. But I think we ought not underestimate the threatening nature of reorganization. People think their careers are jeopardized, et cetera, et cetera. And what we find, I think quite often is the discussion about how you organize becomes extremely threatening and disruptive to the organization. And yet it's something which is so important, it takes a confident person to say, no, we ought to really toss this up in the air, and maybe we do it a different way. People feel their power base, they feel their influence being undermined. They fear for their jobs. So I'd have to say there were some pretty gut wrenching experiences in my early career as we went through this. And I remember walking into a meeting with one of the general managers of a house Smelting, and there was a young consultant there in early stage of his career who thought his career was going to end based on the lecture he'd been given by this general manager of the Smelter. So I think we ought not underestimate how threatening organization change is. And I think on occasions when we extol it in a very doctrinare fashion, that only makes it more threatening.