Managing Innovation and Change

Citation

Holyoak, L. (2003), "Managing Innovation and Change", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 52-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2003.24.1.52.1

Managing Innovation and Change is a collection of pieces compiled from previously published books and journals: some are edited for inclusion in this book and some are straightforward reproductions. The authors of the pieces range from academic staff in the UK and USA to consultants and senior members of organisations. The book’s primary purpose is as a reader for an Open University Masters course and this is its second edition. I am not familiar with the first edition, but the editors say that there have been some changes in emphasis since the original (Managing Innovation) in 1991.

The book is divided into three parts (Management, Innovation and Change, respectively), each of which is in two sections. Each of the six sections has a short preface written by Henry and Mayle. In the first part they bring together pieces under the section headings of Management context (which ends with an interesting piece on management and the environment, which should give some idea of the range of topics here) and Managing people. The nine chapters of the next section comprise five on Policy and management and four on Partnerships and networks. The final part is shorter, with three pieces collected under the heading “Organisational restructuring” and three under “Impact of technology”.

Some chapters stood out because they were more readable than the rest, for example “Managing professional intellect” by James Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein. This one and a couple of others (despite the different backgrounds of their authors) all shared the strength of combining theory and practice without interrupting the flow of the text with referencing: upon investigation most of the chapters I really enjoyed came originally from the Harvard Business Review. In some ways they fulfilled the criterion discussed by Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown and Philip Bromley in their piece entitled “Strategic stories: how 3M is writing business planning”, namely the benefits of story structure for documents. One other chapter (not originally from the Harvard Business Review) also tells a story and is memorable and that is James Dyson’s “A new philosophy of business”. Unfortunately this chapter was also memorable for its occasional smug tone, so I did not put it in the category of ones I really enjoyed.

Given that this is a second edition, and given that the elements are not original pieces, I was surprised to see typographical errors, for example on page 137 where reference is made to “the annuals of modern business”. However, this did give me some amusement as I tried to decide if these annuals were of the flower variety or the children’s books usually available at Christmas. I also felt that some of the chapters did not fit well with the rest: inasmuch as any collection of pieces can be said to have a style, I thought the straightforward reports of empirical work fared badly next to the review and case study pieces.

All in all, I assume this book is ideal for students on the Open University course for which it is the text, but for this reader, without the benefit of the course material which it backs up, it does not feel like a coherent whole. The contributions of the editors are fairly minimal and maybe should be strengthened by the addition of a summary chapter at the end of each part (or at least at the end of the whole book) to draw out the argument once the audience is familiar with the supporting evidence.