A-Z of CSR - change management

A while back, that unstoppable author on CSR Wayne Visser invited me to write an entry on change management for the updated 2010 edition of his A-Z of Corporate Social Responsibility. What a great opportunity!  Not having a very clear picture of the readership, I began by justifying the inclusion of the topic.

Some businesses are very good at CSR. Others find it a struggle or are only just beginning. If you want to improve an organisation, then you want to change it. Sometimes the scale of improvement which environmental champions or others want to see is quite large. So far-reaching organisational change may be desired.

What do we know about how organisations change, and how organisational change can be managed - or catalysed and steered?

The article goes on to contrast ideas about planned organisational change with perspectives which see change as an emergent phenomenon.  It also looks at what changes, when an organisation changes, drawing on Schein's three levels of culture.

And as you'd expect, there are signposts to some practical advice.

What did I miss?

If I'm asked to do an update for a future edition, what changes should I make to the article?

Further reading

You can buy a copy here (NB Amazon don't seem to be able to distinguish this 2010 edition from the previous edition).

I've also posted a slide show which develops some of these thoughts, which you can reach via this blog entry.

One for the Dads

I'm not a great one for 'top' lists.  ('To do' lists are an entirely different matter.) Perhap it's a girl/boy thing: my life partner loves nothing better than to update his bird list,  flick through the cricket statistician's bible Wisden, or relive his youth by combing down indexes of obscure Clash gigs.

As for me, when my kids ask me what my top three favourite songs are, I'm really stumped.  I don't think I'd even be able to narrow it down to the eight specified by Desert Island Discs.

So I wasn't that interested when the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and Greenleaf published The Top 50 Sustainability Books.   In fact, it wasn't until I actually had a copy to take home from a workshop that I realised its great value.

Because of course it's so much more than a list.  Each book in the top fifty is summarised, and its ideas put into a wider context. The author(s) are profiled, there are some choice extracts and reflections from the authors about the impact of the book.

Well-known classics like Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful sit next to more recent and more obscure : Heat, and The Chaos Point.

Wayne Visser and Oliver van Heel have done a great job, creating a pass notes summary and bluffers guide to some absolute classics.  The book helps the busy reader understand key ideas in the sustainability field, reminds them about what they've already read - sometimes years ago - and introduces them to some new thought leaders.

So I'm happy to discover that my initial reaction was wrong.

Off to begin my list of books I should have paid attention to first time around...

Update: May 2011

Wayne has been blogging about an updated list, noticing trends towards more practical titles and an increase from a low base of women authors. See here.