TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

Change Without Pain
by Eric Abrahamson
218 pages; hardcover; $26.95
Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2004

Suppose that every time you took up a new hobby you discarded everything from the previous one. Friends you made, equipment and books you purchased and the knowledge you gained were all abandoned as you pursued your current interest. Sometimes, forgetting that you had tried a pastime before, you started over as if it was totally new to you.

Sounds confusing, doesn’t it? Not to mention expensive and stressful. And yet that’s precisely how many companies act as they scramble to respond to changes in the business environment. Staff, talent and established business practices are tossed aside in grand gestures supposedly intended to keep the company on the cutting edge.

The process tends to be stormy, is typically set in motion by new management, and is euphemistically referred to as downsizing, outsourcing or revitalizing. But, like any storm, destruction is often the result.

In Change Without Pain, author, consultant and professor Eric Abrahamson laments the tendency to initiate change by discarding what’s already in place. He believes the stress inherent in this type of ‘repetitive change syndrome’ leads to chaos, burnout and potential failure.

He offers instead a different approach, which he calls creative recombination. That’s a fancy term for looking at the knowledge, equipment and people already in place around you and seeing how they fit into new situations.

Mr. Abrahamson admits there are times when dumping old habits and practices may be required. But he presents a clear-eyed, common sense examination of the turmoil caused when business – and society in general - skips frenetically from one fad to the next.

Despite the book’s title, change may never be possible without some pain. But building on what already exists can certainly make the process easier and more likely to succeed.

It’s an idea that’s been around a while. Perhaps, as Mr. Abrahamson suggests, the time has come to blow the dust off and take another look.

 

Review originally published June 2004.