By: Phil Buckley
Reviewed by: Glain Roberts-McCabe
The Premise: Change with Confidence is consultant Phil Buckley’s first book and provides leaders and change professionals with answers to the top 50 questions about change that Buckley has encountered in his career as a corporate change specialist. The book is organized around four phases of a change initiative: figuring it out, planning for change, managing change and making change stick. Each section then dives into various questions that come up and provides an overview of why the issue is important; case examples of both poorly executed and well executed programs; and, steps that outline what works. The book provides agendas, templates and a variety of highly pragmatic resources that can also be downloaded from the author’s website. Each chapter is tight (between 3-5 pages on average) and the book is constructed in a way that allows you to jump in and out to get the information you need when you need it.
The Bottom-line: This book scores extremely high on the pragmatic scale for me. What you will get from this book is essentially a change management consultant at your fingertips. The steps in each chapter are practical and the templates extremely useful and easily adaptable to the majority of change projects you may encounter. For individuals who tend to run change initiatives by gut and on the fly, this is going to give you a huge boost in helpful structure. For those who’ve never led large scale change initiatives before, the words of caution and tools that may help you push back or get more funding or additional resources will be invaluable. For everyone else, I guarantee you’ll pick up something you didn’t know. I love books written by in the trenches experts and this is one of them. In it, you’ll get the good, the bad and the ugly and pick up some easily actionable strategies that you’ll be able to put into place immediately. Don’t lead a change without it!
Roundtable Rating: Strongly recommended for anyone leading change… which means it’s for everyone!
Check out the book and learn more about Phil’s work by visiting www.changewithconfidence.com.
