Bridging Strategic Management and Change Management

Change is a pervasive and constant feature of modern business life. It can be said to be the single most important element of successful business management today. Ignoring or trivialising a changing trend can be costly. To remain relevant in increasingly aggressive markets, organisations and individuals have to embrace and adopt a positive attitude to change. In all business environments, managers and employees are required to identify, lead and undergo unprecedented levels of change in order to sustain advantage in an increasingly competitive and inter-connected world.

The imperative to change the way organisations do business may be great but the success rate of change management isn't great. About 75 percent of all organisational change programmes failed, largely because employees felt left out of the process and end up lacking the motivation, skills and knowledge to adopt the new systems and procedures.(1) A global survey of 500 companies by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed nine out of ten obstacles to corporate change were linked to the capabilities, attitudes or behaviours of people.(2) The same survey also found that the top ten success factors for change placed emphasis on people. Therefore, the barriers to successful change are usually people related.

This calls for a holistic approach to plan strategically and to manage change successfully in dealing with both internal and external changes. Strategic management and change management have to be an integral part of the organisation’s strategy, people, system and culture. This requires executives to know and understand their organisation’s mission, core competencies, and capabilities. They should be able to identify the external factors and their impacts on their organisation, and be able to develop strategies and implement them through a systematic framework of sustaining change. The iterative process for strategic change management is illustrated below.

(1) Herding Cats: Human Change Management”, Mark J. Dawson and Mark L. Jones,  PricewaterhouseCoopers.

(2) “PwC: People are the Key in Change Management”, Business Times, 20 May 2004.