Breaking the Code of Change by Beer Nohria Book Report

Breaking the Code of Change by Beer Nohria Book Report/Review Breaking the Code of Change by Beer Nohria â€" Book Report/Review Example > The paper “ Breaking the Code of Change by Beer Nohria” is an outstanding example of book review on management. The most effective change should begin at the top because senior executives, as well as top management in an organization, are better positions to lead organizational reinvention. The top management should engage lower organizational levels in establishing suitable local visions, operation goals, and approaches anytime a change is being implemented in an organization. Involving lower-level employees is important because they are the ones that can effectively translate corporate strategies and efficient operating approaches (Beer, Nohria, 2000). The business world is ever-changing, getting more complicated, increasing demands and increasing competition and therefore organizations need to change their strategies to respond to organization-wide changes. A successful change should thus be systematic and generates key alterations and thus organizational is costly. The r eason why top-led change has a higher likelihood of success in key change efforts is that senior management has the breadth of perspective and strategy formulation role and their position as organizational leaders gives them the power to make key organizational decisions such as an organizational change (Beer, Nohria, 2000). Senior management has organizational roles that require them to take a multifunctional business approach to decisions and hence they have broadly defined perspectives. Additionally, senior leaders have a higher likelihood of appreciating how an organization is an intertwined set of functions and systems, whereby changes in one will affect the other (Beer, Nohria, 2000). Senior organizational leaders represent the controlling or guiding force in regard to organizational activities, such as changes. As a result, they have a special advantage over the juniors because in case of an organizational change they are in a position of harnessing the power of the attrib ution process. Senior leaders are able to use events and their own behaviors to inform the whole organization about what should be done. The ability to harness attributions hence becomes predominantly vital within organizational change efforts. This is because all organizational members are attentive to what senior leaders pay attention to. On the contrary, junior managers have lower status and limited access to the limelight and hence it is hard for them to develop comparable attributes among other organizational members, particularly among their peers and other departments. Junior leaders lack adequate formal authority to project attributions. Accordingly, it is hard for low-level leaders to capitalize on the attribution process that can otherwise improve their efforts to stimulate organizational change (Beer, Nohria, 2000). Another reason why top-led change efforts are most effective in driving change in an organization is due to their power position. In particular, senior lea ders can control rewards, performance, recruitment, information, people, as well as access to resources and these, are the organizational building blocks. For instance, senior leaders have the power to fill important positions with supportive change agents and can also remove anyone who they deem to be blocking organizational changes. Obviously, junior levels do not have this level of authority and power. In addition, senior organizational leader possesses political influence and therefore they can deploy this influence to access valuable resources and to change attention to specific business functions and individuals. Therefore, in the case of an organizational change, senior leaders can use their political influence to implement the change (Beer, Nohria, 2000).