Review: Shaping the Future

Copyright © 2004 by Don Blohowiak
Don@LeadWell.com   http://www.leadwell.com/

Consultants William P. Belgard and Steven R. Rayner, authors of Shaping the Future: A Dynamic Process for Creating and Achieving Your Company's Strategic Vision, challenge change cliches in an anecdote-rich book with some interesting ideas.

The book's subtitle proclaims that it is, "A Dynamic Process for Creating and Achieving Your Company's Strategic Vision." While there are occasional bits of actionable advice between the covers, the book really doesn't describe a cogent, implementable process (dynamic or otherwise).

Shaping the Future is really about rethinking the principles of change management, and the dust jacket copy does telegraph this.

To their credit, Belgard and Rayner do effectively contradict common wisdom about implementing change programs. They:

• Defy the "burning platform" mandate that other management pundits claim must be created to force support for a change initiative;
  
  
• Deny that change must emanate from the CEO's suite, suggesting (and offering examples) that most real change is driven by the middle of an organization not by the top;
  
  
• Push back against the prevalent assumption that managers have to combat their employees' resistance to change. (The authors essentially suggest that garnering support for change is more effective than fighting resistance to it.)

Messrs. Belgard and Rayner also rightfully challenge the convention that to create "buy-in" for change, executives must stage pep rallies and deploy slick, sometimes frenzied internal sales campaigns. Such top-down, hard-sell events, they correctly argue, are not as effective as associate-to-associate water cooler conversations that affirm the coming change as credible. To spur that phenomenon on a wide scale, the authors suggest cultivating the corporate grapevine by seeding social networks. Grand idea. Few implementable details provided.

Too Cute, Too Familiar

The authors begin the book by making the apparently obligatory but totally superfluous case that we live in times of change. Amid this bit of extraneousness, perhaps to give the appearance of originality, Belgard and Rayner coin goofy terms like "megadigm" (big paradigm change, get it?), and "infolocity" -- fast evolving information likened both to dog years and internet time. Ugh. Later in the book the authors recommend that you start an epidemic of "pro-change flu." There's an appealing image.

These oh-so-clever indulgences don't further the cause of either understanding or implementing "a dynamic process" for anything. (Still, I have to give the authors their due for minting this charming meme, "mind barnacle" -- a memorable idea that attaches itself to people's consciousness so that they more readily support a change effort.)

There are stimulating insights in Shaping the Future. Unfortunately, there's lots of stale amid the fresh. So much of the book's territory has been previously trampled over and over: have a compelling vision, heed your values, empower others, communicate to an extreme, execute well. Blah, blah, blah.

The real strength of Shaping the Future? Its well-told anecdotes. Many of them are drawn from corporations in the authors' stomping grounds in Washington state (such as Boeing and Microsoft), as well as Harley-Davidson, the U.S. Navy, Quaker Oats, and others. Historical tales also occasionally punctuate some points to good effect. So the book reads palatably, even when it is plowing through worn fields of truisms everyone already knows all too well.

Buy or Not?

If you are about to undertake a change initiative, or are in the midst of one, yes, get this book. You won't find much in the way of a specific prescriptive process, but you'll likely get some insights that can lead to actionable ideas. And better results.

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