Change with Confidence: Answers to the 50 Biggest Questions That Keep Change Leaders Up at Night

Praise for CHANGE WITH CONFIDENCE

“Phil Buckley is a world-class change leader and world-champion enthusiast for effective change management. Straightforward and engaging, Phil addresses the 50 questions all change managers need to answer with confidence in order to succeed. Rare too for an author in this field, he shares the ‘how-not-to’ as well as the ‘how-to.’ This is a book any manager wanting to succeed in change should keep close by.”

— Professor Chris Bones, Dean Emeritus, Henley Business School; Professor of Leadership, University of Manchester; and award-winning author of The Cult of the Leader

“Phil Buckley’s book gives excellent, practical advice on how to implement change in any private or public organization. What makes Change with Confidence so special is that it is organized around questions that anybody who is engaged in or leading change management will find to be key to their success. The real-life examples given for each question make this a very readable book. A must-buy for anybody who wants to avoid the most common mistakes in change management.”

— Stefan A. Bomhard, President, Europe, Bacardi Martini Group

“Change with Confidence provides leaders and leaders of change with a wealth of knowledge and experience that they can apply to their own change initiatives, and the real-world examples provide additional clarity on how to successfully manage or avoid common pitfalls.”

— David Sculthorpe, CEO, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada

Change Management is about helping people decide to change successfully

If you have been charged with leading a change initiative, chances are you were chosen for the job—that is, you didn’t volunteer, but rather were tapped to lead or manage a large change project. You may have been given a short briefing and left to your own devices to succeed or fail in an uncertain, often threatening, environment. You may find yourself struggling to adapt your skill set to unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing conditions, conscious that your performance will affect your future career paths.

Change with Confidence addresses the 50 biggest questions that change leaders ask time and again, and provides the context, examples, and advice to answer them well, and to enable successful, sustainable change. Whether you’re trying to figure it out, are in the planning stage, are actively managing or are working to make it stick, you’ll find guidance for a wide range of issues, including:

• Analyzing previous change initiatives to see what worked, what didn’t, and why
• Finding out who can influence your success or failure, help you, or trip you up
• Determining what resources you’ll need and how to get them
• Overcoming change fatigue and opposition to change.

Although every change has its own circumstances, there are proven processes, tactics, and behaviors that lead to lasting success. Change with Confidence offers practical, experience-based advice on a difficult and stressful challenge.

PHIL BUCKLEY is a senior change management professional with over twenty years of experience developing and executing change strategies to achieve aggressive business goals across global businesses in Canada, the Americas, and the UK. He has managed twenty-seven large-scale change projects, most recently co-leading global change management for the $19.6 billion Kraft Foods acquisition of Cadbury with a team of forty change leads across sixty countries.

His change assignments include mergers and acquisitions, demergers, organization restructurings, efficiency drives, culture initiatives, business model developments, strategy creation and deployments, downsizings, systems implementations, and organizational capability developments. Phil's practical experience working on change initiatives in twenty countries has taught him how to help people make lasting changes within their local environments and to give them the results they need. He is a frequent public speaker on change, including hundreds of corporate keynote presentations, business facilitations, and college teaching classes. His weekly blog is at changewithconfidence.com.