 Fundamentals and Trivia in Complex Organizational Change: a Longitudinal Inquiry into Hydro-Quebec's ManagementWorking Papers from Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montreal- Abstract: Co-operation is the essence of an organization's existence and a key condition for its long term survival. Change efforts put co-operation to a dire test. The reason is not the change itself, but rather managers' tendency to stick to oversimplified ideas or tools, and to single-mindedly pursue their implementation. Any idea's or management tool's usefulness is time-bound, and in the course of a change, the need to maintain relevance and insure co-operation succumbs to the past usefulness of the tools at hand. Even more importantly, managers are rarely aware of the need to maintain co-operation and, lacking a stable beacon, are led adrift by the change momentum. In this paper, we use a 20 year long longitudinal study of Hydro-Quebec, one of the largest power utility in North America, to show how the process of change leads away from the need to maintain co-operation and thus emphasizes trivia. We argue that, in a major change effort, the need to maintain co-operation, rather than any other objective, should be the manager's walking stick. Keywords: BUSINESS MANAGEMENT; MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES; MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fth:etcomo:99-05 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montreal- Canada; ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES COMMERCIALES (H.E.C.), 5255 DECELLES MONTREAL H3T 1V6 QUEBEC. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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