Review: The Change Book by Krogerus & Tschäppeler
The Change Book contains 52 different models of change designed to help us understand our ever-shifting world. With brief overviews and diagrams it attempts to explain complex changes from the history of the world and the advent of various world powers to the tipping point when things start to become ‘uncool’.
I was hoping to find some magical insight into change management that I could share with you, but instead the book is best suited to those in general management who like management books but never actually get around to reading them. The difference with The Change Book is that it is very easy to breeze through and cherry-pick interesting bits and pieces and, as a ‘dipping’ book, needn’t be devoured from front to back.
Reading the book did allow me to sharpen my perception on why things happen the way they do when events are taken in the context of their antecedents, even if I didn’t agree with the thrust of every chapter. Particularly useful for managers and project managers were the first few chapters of the ‘Change My World’ segment, which included commentary on decision-making (‘How you can make the right decision’), multi-tasking (‘Why we let ourselves be distracted’) and time management (‘Why we don’t have any time’). More than anything however, I think this recommends the duo’s first offering, The Decision Book, over this one.
Unfortunately I didn’t feel the format worked in favour of some of the concepts. The diagrams were created to bestow pithy insights but some ended up being so simplified that they instead became complicated.
The Change Book will be of passing interest for most and may be used as a starting point for further development of the concepts into project management processes. However, I don’t think most practising project managers will extract anything different from this book than they will have already garnered from other sources on the subject of change.
In the end I wanted this to be a change management book that would be accessible to project managers and others in management roles but it wasn’t. I wanted to like it, but instead I found it a little too shallow for a thirsty mind.
The Change Book
By Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler
RRP $22.99 (buy online)
Published by Profile Books (Allen & Unwin)
You may also be interested in the authors’ website, which includes posts about project management models.
