Best Books on Organizational Change Management in 2022
If you'd like to learn about managing organizational change, these are the books you absolutely must-read. These books will teach you how to anticipate and address the challenges in your journey of successfully turning around the company.
14 Must-Read Books on Change Management
If you are a leader and/or work in the field of Human Resources and are tasked with transforming your organization, these hand-picked recommendations of books should definitely be part of your reading list.
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Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos
- Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, Steve Berez
Business leaders aspire to create nimble, flexible enterprises. But their day-to-day reality is silos, sluggish processes, and stalled innovation. Today, 'agile' is hailed as the bridge across this chasm, with the potential to transform a company and catapult it to the head of the pack. Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to becoming a high-performance operation. Doing Agile Right is a must-have guide for any company trying to make the transition--or trying to sustain high agility.
Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness
- Frederic Laloux
In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time, in the past, when humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has achieved extraordinary breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals? A few pioneers have already cracked the code and they show us, in practical detail, how it can be done.
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change
- Harvard Business Review
If you read nothing else on change management, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you spearhead change in your organization. These articles will inspire you to: Lead change through 8 critical stages; Establish a sense of urgency; Overcome addiction to the status quo; Mobilize commitment; Silence naysayers; Minimize the pain of change; Concentrate resources; Motivate change when business is good
ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community
- Jeffrey M. Hiatt
After 14+ years of research with corporate change, the ADKAR model has emerged as a holistic approach that brings together the collection of change management work into a simple, results oriented model. This model ties together aspects of change management - readiness assessments, sponsorship, communications, coaching, training and resistance management. All of these are placed into a framework that is oriented on the required phases for realizing change with individuals and the organization.
Change Management: The People Side of Change
- Jeffrey M. Hiatt, Timothy J. Creasey
This book is a solid, research-based introduction to the discipline of change management, and a primer to catalyze change leadership and competency in managers and executives. Change Management is a practical look at what it means to manage the people side of change, and gives the reader insight into best practices in this area.
Leading Change
- John P. Kotter
John Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.
Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations
- John P. Kotter, Dan S. Cohen
Building off of Kotter’s revolutionary eight-step process, this book vividly illustrates how large-scale change can work. With real-life stories of people in organizations, the authors show how teams and individuals get motivated and activated to overcome obstacles to change—and produce spectacular results. Kotter and Cohen argue that change initiatives often fail because leaders rely too exclusively on data and analysis to get a buy-in from their teams instead of appealsing to their emotions.
Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework
- Kim S. Cameron, Robert E. Quinn
This key resource provides a means of understanding and changing organizational culture in order to make organizations more effective. It provides validated instruments for diagnosing organizational culture and management competency; a theoretical framework (competing values) for understanding organizational culture; and a systematic strategy and methodology for changing organizational culture and personal behavior.
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
- Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais
In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
- Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
Blitzscaling (growing at a breakneck pace) requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the shifts and weather the challenges that arise at each stage of a company’s life cycle: designing business models to ignite and sustain relentless growth; strategies to hire and manage; evolution of the founder's role and company culture as business matures, and more.
The Effective Change Manager's Handbook
- Richard Smith, David King, Ranjit Sidhu, Dan Skelsey
The Effective Change Manager's Handbook is designed to help practitioners, employers and academics define and practice change management successfully and to develop change management maturity within their organization. A single-volume learning resource covering the range of knowledge required it includes chapters from established thought leaders on topics ranging from benefits management, stakeholder strategy, facilitation, change readiness, project management and education and learning support.
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization
- Robert Kegan
In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.
Change the Culture, Change the Game
- Roger Connors, Tom Smith
Two-time New York Times bestselling authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith show how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset-their people.
Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change
- William Bridges, Susan Bridges
Organizational transitions affect people; it is always people, rather than a company, who have to embrace a new situation and carry out the corresponding change. As veteran business consultant William Bridges explains, transition is successful when employees have a purpose, a plan, and a part to play. Directed at managers on all rungs of the corporate ladder, this classic bestseller provides practical, step-by-step strategies for minimizing disruptions and navigating uncertain times.
