Organizational Culture Change: Unleashing your Organization's Potential in Circles of 10 Paperback – December 14, 2012

Organizational Culture Change: Unleashing your Organization's Potential in Circles of 10 is a worthwhile contribution to this vitally-important subject. I work in NY as a management consultant and use the Competing Values Framework with my clients. I've found this book to be a one-of-a-kind reference tool and I can easily see how useful such a guidebook can be to business leaders, too. After all, Corporate culture is the only sustainable business advantage available today.Marcella Bremer's new book demystifies the process of changing culture by first helping readers understand how to determine the kind of culture you have - with a 15 minute assessment tool. Then, she offers specific steps to determine the kind of culture that will be necessary in the future for the organization to be successful. What I particularly liked is how the author drew upon her own consulting experiences. For example, she offers corporate culture profiles of the various industries in which she's worked, including banking, healthcare, high schools, engineering, IT consulting and maintenance, and more. This is interesting because the culture of an organization must match the expectations of its customers. For example, if a hospital's culture doesn't reflect consistency, stability, reliability, and attention to the rules, patients will not have the confidence, comfort, and trust to go there. If a bank does not pay attention to building long-term, trusting relationships and only cares about its transactions, sales revenue, and profits, then customers might look for another bank.Leaders in organizations will find this book helpful because it guides them through each step of the process, and provides time-tested practices to get employees involved and participating in the change process in a fun, meaningful way. She even offers an outline for conducting a workshop.Culture change has always been a topic like psychology - people know of it and respect it, but often feel it's too risky to fix themselves. With this new book, Bremer gives us a practical guide, like a cook book, for successfully creating the exact culture an organization needs to be as successful as it can be. I highly recommend this book! Organizational Culture Change: Unleashing your Organization's Potential in Circles of 10

A very thorough and at the same time very practical guide to organizational culture change. The basic tool Marcella Bremer uses as a starting point for change is the Organizational Cultural Assessment Instrument (OCAI) developed and extensively tested by management professors Cameron and Quin. Bremer and her husband Marcel Lamers both have years of experience working as consultants in the field of culture change. They were licensed by Cameron and Quin to use the OCAI-tool which they first used in the Netherlands and later also abroad. Workshops with clients and their experience with OCAI resulted in this practical book. The authors want to keep change small, personal and focused on specific behaviors in change circles, small groups of about ten coworkers. Thus they incorporated the ideas of Leandro Herrero, an in England based consultant who developed the idea of viral change. Small groups of people live the intended behavioral change and spread it like a virus through the entire organization. Herrero published about his concept in Viral Change and in Homo Imitans. Organizational Culture Change is not written to be read but to be practised. It provides the reader with a tool to start the change process, examples of results and all the steps necessary to reach sustainable change. Despite it's working character, it is a great read.

There are a mass of books out there on Organizational Change but not many are this practical. I have always been a fan of Rosabeth Moss Kanter who has some excellent books on Change Management but for me there has always been a gap between great theories and practical application. Most HR Departments seem to be led more by Corporate Lawyers rather than people focused on development so it is left to the line managers to try and change an organization from within. This is an excellent book to give departmental managers tools to effect change without a corporate mandate if they so desired. Even better if it is mandated from the top but as has been seen on so many occasions just because the man at the top says it will happen does not mean the troops on the ground see it happen. Really enjoyed this approach.

Organizational Culture Change: Unleashing your Organization's Potential in Circles of 10 Good reading for understanding how thinks really work in a organization and how to have their corporate culture on leveraging their business, with a new approach suggesting groups of 10 people to work together for better understand their tasks. Based on the great work called Competing Value Framework, it uses OCAI - Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument to make the culture diagnosis.

An easy to read, pragmatic book with best practices, business cases and an interesting overview of culture profiles from industry groups all over the world from the OCAI online database. This book focuses on the power of human behaviors in the workplace - a viewpoint that goes easily unnoticed in our (too) busy days at work. Even when you're not a change consultant or manager, it may help gain awareness to notice the behaviors that make the difference. In my opinion this book can be used for many fields of work, including health care.Jacob J. Ennema, M.D., Ph.D.,Ennema Medical Consultancy,The Netherlands

This book is a great prescription on how to implement culture change in an organization. It uses the OCAI framework to walk you through, step by-step on how to assess what changes are needed through how to galvanize the organization to action to get desired results. A must-read for anyone contemplating culture change in their organization.

There is much to commend in this book. The author comes across as a very experienced change practitioner, who openly shares both successful and more difficult change experiences.The book is a great endorsement for the Competing Values Framework and specifically the tool OCAI. The author is a real evangelist for the framework and the tool. The book is also a good source of practical wisdom about cultural change. Many change books talk about cultural change, you can see the author of this book has real experience in this specific change topic.Where I find the book less successful is that it seems to try to combine two different books. One is a "how to" manual for using and benefiting from the OCAI framework and progressing from an assessment to change. The other is a more general change management book providing tips and techniques for change, and advice on the conditions in which change will and will not work. Both of these are helpful, but the synthesis into one book did not quite work for me. Certain chapters feel out of place (for example chapter 23, which did not fit with the rest of the content for me, or chapter 21 as a case study was insightful but I was not sure how it fitted with the main contents of the book). Sometimes I was not clear who the target audience was - internal or external change consultants, change managers, organisational leaders or those undergoing change. These are overlapping categories, but at times the author seems specifically to be talking to one audience and at other times a different audience. Finally, there were some stylitsic points that I occasionally found irritating. These may be purely a personal reactions as other reviewers seem very positive about the book.If you are interested in or want to learn about cultural change, and specifically if you are interested in applying the competing values framework and using OCAI then this will be a very helpful and practical guide. If you are looking for more general change management advice, probaly of less value - although there is a good advice scattered throughout the book.

I came across Marcella's book, and the OCAI-online website, relatively recently and wish I had found them earlier. The Cameron-Quinn 'Competing Values Framework' was an interesting tool I had come across while researching for my own book 'The Change Equation', in 2008/9, but I didn't really appreciate how useful it was until reading Marcella's book and working through her online version of the model.The key to her approach is in the strapline:'Unleashing your Organization's Potential in Circles of 10'. It's this practical, participative aspect which works for me, with its focus on measuring the gap between 'as is' and to be', defining the direction and nature of the changes, then working from the bottom up to put these into a change programme that is owned and understood by the workforce, not imposed from above. I particularly like the emphasis on getting the guys at the top to recognise the need to 'walk the talk' and not just expect others to change.I recommend the book and will be exploring the video training etc. that is on offer from the website, in the coming months.

A clear, detailed explanation of understanding culture, changing culture and intimately involving the employees in the process. It is suitable for all managers and employees in the profit and not-for-profit sectors.It is highly practical, written by someone who has done the job successfully and, as she admits, sometimes less successfully. In addition, it is based on academic research.The author highlights fundamental rules with regard to change that should never be ignored.I found the examples and approach mostly focused on measuring the existing culture, defining the desired culture and then detailing specifc actions to close the gap. However, change often arrives as a result of the environment, due to technology evolution for example, and in these cases the culture or the change that is being imposed on the organisation from the outside, although necessary, may not be desired. This was touched on in the book, but a more expansive discussion would have been welcome.

Doing more of the same won’t make the organization strive. Our organizations must be transformed. This book represents a great manual for action for any cultural change. It shows the path, presents the procedure, its full of stories, cases and research findings that make it solid.It’s not to be read in one night. You must put its ideas at test, get into action and adapt it to your field. Yet it is an excellent guide for the tour.

I thought ot would delve moee into conducting a cultural audit but it didnt.