Summary Leadership Studies Lecture #2: Change Leadership

Leadership Studies
Lecture #2 Notes
70% of All Change Initiatives Fail
 Let’s follow the traces of this number and see where it leads us
 Because it tells us something about change management as well as about the field in
which this subject is situated

Cracking the Code of Change
 Nitin Nohria and Michael Beer (2000), Harvard Business Review
 Questions
o When does a change effort fail?
o How can we conceptualize success?
o Is it really a binary opposition (i.e. hit or miss)?
o For how long do we have to wait before we can say whether a change initiative is
successful or not?
o Who gets to define success?
 Top management?
 Stakeholders?
 Employees?
 People living in the close proximity of an organization?
 Political actors?
 Animals?
 Everyone?

Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?
 Mark Hughes (2011), Journal of Change Management
 Questions
o What are the origins of the 70% fact?
o And is it empirically sound?
 It is not!
o What academic arguments challenge the concept of inherent organizational
change failure rate?




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