Transforming the Organization: A Social-Technical Approach

The rapidly increasing rate of world change demands not just incremental change that organizations have used in the past, but fast, radical alterations of their strategy, culture, structure, and processes. Nothing less than transformation will do, says Dr. Oden-a complex, continuing effort that may be closer to revolution than evolution. Oden lays it out in his customarily clear, programmatic way. He covers actions that must precede the initiation of a transformation; guidance on how to perform the technical, social, and behavioral tasks, and the actions required to wrap up and integrate everything into a complete, workably transformed organization. His book provides a clear goal for the transformation, an excellent description of transformational leadership, and a simple, powerful model of the process. The result is essential reading for upper management in private and public sector organizations and for their colleagues in the academic community.

Part I covers the preparatory actions that organizations should take before initiating a transformation, without which the effort is doomed to failure, says Dr. Oden. In Part II he covers the technical or engineering aspects of the transformation. First he develops a process map of the organization as the basis for process improvement; then he diagnoses the existing and future organization to determine how processes should be improved. In Part III he looks at the various organizational change methods that are available, conducts a broad design of the total organization, and then designs the human resource support processes for the transformed organization. Finally, in Part IV, Dr. Oden shows how to incorporate the redesigned processes into the existing system-the most difficult part of the transformation-and ends by showing how better integration can be achieved to provide better overall transformational results.