Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout

by Eric Abrahamson

Outlining a positive approach to change called creative recombination, this title identifies five key elements that every company has - people, structures, culture, processes, and networks. It offers a toolkit of techniques for recombining, reusing, and redeploying these resources to achieve cost-efficient, less painful organizational change.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 4, 2003

About the author

Eric Abrahamson is the youngest ever full professor of management at Columbia University's School of Business.

Abrahamson studies the creation, spread, use and rejection of innovative techniques for managing organizations and their employees. He is best known for his work on fads and fashions in management techniques. He is also an expert on the management of organizational change. He has explored the topic of change management in Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), which won a Best Book of the Year award from Strategy and Business.

More recently, Abrahamson has been studying the dynamics of moderately messy system - offices, organizations and even industrial districts - that would function less well were they any less messy or any more orderly. A summary of his scholarly work was published in Research in Organizational Behavior under the title "Disorganizational Theory and Disorganizational Behavior: Towards and Etiology of Messes" (2002). Most recently, Abrahamson has coauthored, with David Freedman, a book that popularizes these ideas about the benefits of moderately messy system: A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, How cluttered closets, jumbled offices, and on-the-fly planning make the world a better place (Little, Brown and Company, 2007).

He lectures and consults on these topics for companies around the world.

Reviews

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Examples are a bit dated, but philosophy is useful still. No need to completely destroy in order to change, focus on rebuilding or recombining.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this book as part of a post graduate course. Even worse I had to read it twice... the first time was bad enough. This is the worst kind of rubbish I've ever had to read in my entire life and I have to tell you I have to read some real doozies at work. The whole book was developed from a magazine article... well lets just say the author should have kept it at that. There really is just not enough contact to fill a book and the analysis is banal at best with the majority of the book extremely repetitive and sentences strung together with cliches and advertising slogans. I'm still emotionally scared by this book as you can probably tell.

[Paul Bard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pacing is the topic of this piece.

Change is best when you pace it so it is slow, derivative, and involves tinkering and kludging.

"Kludging is tinkering, but with a college education."

You have to pace change to the company. It's important to slow down and take it easy between periods and radical change.

This is a fairly interesting read of what appear to be truisms of every day life - slow down when tired, experiment for a solution, and alternate between busy and relaxed periods.

[Marlinex]

This ended up in my shopping cart after recommendation from someone (can't remember who). Another book that I have to help me achieve work/life balance, empower my staff, and take the chaotic nature of work in stride so I can get on with living life. Can't they just give me that in a pill?