Changing Your Company from the Inside Out by Davis

by Gerald F. Davis

MAKE YOUR COMPANY A FORCE FOR GOODYou’re ambitious. You’re not afraid to take risks. You want to bring about positive social change. And while your peers have left a trail of failed start-ups in their wake, you want to initiate change from within an established company, where you can have a more far-reaching, even global impact.Welcome to the club—you’re a social intrapreneur.But even with your enviable skill set, your unwavering social conscience, and your determination to change the world, your path to success is filled with challenges. So how do you get started and maintain your momentum?Changing Your Company from the Inside Out provides the tools to empower you to jump-start initiatives that matter to you—and that should matter to your company. Drawing on lessons from social movements as well as on the work of successful intrapreneurs, Gerald Davis and Christopher White provide you with a guide for creating positive social change from within your own organization.You’ll learn how to answer four key When is the right time for change? Learn how to read your organization’s climate.Why is this a compelling change? Use language and stories to connect your initiative to your organization’s mission, strategy, and values.Who will make this innovation possible? Identify the decision makers you need to persuade and the potential resisters you need to steer around.How can you mobilize your supporters to collaborate on your innovation? Use the online and offline tools and platforms that best support your initiative.This book is a road map for intrapreneurs seeking to reshape their companies into drivers of positive change. If you want to spearhead social innovation from within your company, use this book as your guide.

Genres: Business

Hardcover

First published March 17, 2015

About the author

Gerald F. Davis is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He has published widely in management, sociology, and finance. Recent books include Social Movements and Organization Theory (with Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald) and Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural, and Open System Perspectives (with W. Richard Scott). He is currently Associate Editor of Administrative Science Quarterly and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organization Studies (ICOS) at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[Shai Sachs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is something of a how-to guide for corporate reformers. It draws inspiration heavily from the study of social movements, which is a natural-enough foundation. Corporate reform has become an increasingly important component of a wide range of social movements in the past few decades, so it stands to reason that the strategies employed by broader social movements should be useful to in-house reformers. To that end the authors draw heavily from social reformers: the idea is to identify the right opportunity for reform, the right individuals to target in making one's case, the business rationale for reform, and the right "platforms" for organizing around reform. It's a reasonably good guide, and the "when" section shines most brightly, since it nicely highlights the role that major new initiatives, product lines, and reorganizations play in possibly unrelated reforms.

What's interesting to me is that the book spends comparatively little energy discussing corporate reform that's not tied explicitly to larger social and environmental causes. Most of the book is devoted to the problem of adopting green policies, or human rights protections, or the like - and it's easy enough to see how these kinds of reforms within corporate life can be informed by parallel reforms in political life outside the workplace. What's far less obvious is the following question: what lessons can social movements teach to those who seek reforms - whether small-scale or grand - in corporate organization and governance? There are a few mentions here and there, such as corporate coups and CEO ousters, but they're really at the margins of the book, and they're also the most extreme examples of corporate governance reform. I think the book might have benefited quite a bit from a deeper exploration of corporate governance reform, and a look at the lessons that social reformers may lend to corporate reformers.

This book is a reasonably good high-level overview of the ins and outs of corporate reform, and is certainly a good starting point for those looking to make change.

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the way this book took aspects of social movement theory and applied them to within-company change interesting, but I'm not sure that it really made it clear how you could actually, practically go about creating that change. As someone studying social movements the book was interesting; if I actually had the desire to become an 'intrapreneur' I don't think I'd know where to start even after reading this book. Plenty of interesting examples and cases, though!

[Michael Frisbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very instructive step-by-step to proposing and executing change in the workplace, no matter your position.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't remember anything from this book. Probably equivalent to a curated business blog collection.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not all change is necessarily bad, yet sometimes the most difficult change to implement can be the most rewarding.

Changing how your company operates, improving its societal footprint for the benefit of many can be a very rewarding process. This book seeks to shine a light on this important subject.

It is clearly going to be a more specialist type of book, yet it achieves its objectives with aplomb. The authors build the book around four key questions - when is the right time for change, why is this a compelling change, who will make this innovation possible and how can you mobilize your supporters to collaborate on your innovation? By the end you should be empowered and better informed about how to lead change from within. The implementation is down to you. Clearly this book is aimed at the larger company or for a not-for-profit organisation, yet there is no reason why many of the central points cannot be utilised within smaller ventures.

This change is a lot more than just a social media campaign that will spread the “good word”. Other online tools can help push innovation, analyse your communication style, boost your network effect and keep you on-track.

The authors expertly mix together their central messages and build upon general business knowledge at the same time, allowing the astute reader to take away rather a lot more actionable information than what they might be expecting. This is definitely a book you will want to read sequentially, moving forward slowly but surely whilst thoughtfully considering matters.

Even if you don’t perceive you have the need for such a book or perhaps the power internally to make change, it can still be worth taking a look and soaking in the knowledge it offers. It feels in part as one of those books that many have no direct need for, yet they stand to benefit immensely from indirect exposure to it.

It was an enjoyable, thoughtful, incisive and considerate read that “gently forced” the reader to engage their grey matter a bit.

Changing Your Company from the Inside Out, written by Gerald F. Davis & Christopher J. White and published by Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN 9781422185094, 224 pages. YYYY

[Greg’s Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book Changing Your Company from Inside Out talks about how we can advocate changes inside our organizations using the lessons from social movements. Apparently, the insights from social movements are really applicable to our organizational settings when it comes to advocacy of changes.

What I really like about this book is that it gives the readers a blueprint on how to use lessons from social movements such as the Arab Spring in how one can advocate changes in the organization. This book is unique since it stresses a different kind of change. It primarily talks about the things that an organization can do to its community. Certainly this book achieves its goal of providing actionable insights from what is happening in our society at large to the change initiatives inside companies.

Another reason why anyone who loves reading about businesses should buy this book is the way the ideas are conveyed. The authors provided a clear and concise explanation aside from the convincing evidence of their case. The arguments are well thought out and, more importantly, relevant to what is happening in our society.

The format and illustration is also well laid out. I’ve seen two to three illustrations that helped make the ideas more alive. The tables are also very helpful in conveying the message to the readers.


Overall, I recommend that you buy this book if you are contemplating of making some changes inside your organization and you feel helpless since you do not know what to do. The book is full of examples on how ordinary people can start a movement by using the ubiquitous social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

[Mills College Library]

658.408 D2619 2015