Notes

The Challenge for Organizations
We live in a world that has been turned upside down.

Companies are pouring (make flow) money, technology, and management expertise into regions that were once off limits, acquiring new enterprises, forming joint ventures (projects), creating new global businesses from the ground up.

Many major companies are going through significant changes, including outsourcing, downsizing, reengineering, self-managed work teams, flattening organizations, and doing routine jobs with automation and computers.

Some experts contend (argue) that if you can describe a job precisely (exactely) or write rules for doing it, the job will probably not survive.


Change is avalanching (fall) down upon our heads and most people are utterly (absolutely) unprepared to cope (dealing) with it.

Tomorrow’s world will be different from todays, calling for new organizational approaches.

Organizations will need to be adapting to these changes market conditions and at the same time coping with the need for a renewing rather than reactive workforce.

Every day managers are confronting (come face to face with) massive and accelerating change.

As one writer comments, “Call it whatever you like – reengineering, restructuring, transformation, flattening, downsizing, rightsizing, a quest (search for something) for global competitiveness – it’s real, it’s radical and it’s arriving every day at a company near you.”


Global competition and economic downturns (decline) have exposed a glaring (obvious) weakness in American organizations: the fact that many organizations have become overstaffed, cumbersome (unmanageable), slow and inefficient.

To increase productivity, enhance competitiveness and contain costs, organizations are changing the way they are organized and managed.

The successful twenty-first century manager must deal with a chaotic (in chaos) world of new competitors and constant innovation.

In the future the only winning companies will be the ones that respond quickly to change.

Preparing managers to cope (deal) with today’s accelerating role of change is the central theme/purpose of my lectures (concern of this book).

Modern manager must not only be flexible and adaptive in a changing environment but must also be able to diagnose problems and implement change programs.


Tom Peters suggests that “the time for 10 percent staff cuts and 20 percent quality improvement is past”.


Organizations are never completely static.

They are in continuous interaction with external forces (see figure below).

Changing consumer lifestyles and technological breakthroughs all act on the organization to cause it to change.

The degree of change may vary from one organization to another, but all face the need for adaptation to external forces.

Many of these changes are forced upon the organization, whereas others are generated internally. Because change is occurring so rapidly, there is a need for new ways to manage it.

The Growth and Relevance of OD:

Organizations must adapt to increasingly complex and uncertain technological, economic, political, and cultural changes.

The rapidly changing conditions of the past few years have shown that the organizations are in the midst of unprecedented uncertainty and chaos, and nothing short of a management revolution will save them.

Three major trends are shaping change in organizations: globalization, information technology, and managerial innovation.