Changing the Game: Organizational Transformations of the First, Second, and Third Kinds

How do companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rise to the top of their industries and dominate year after year, while others like PeopLe Express and LA Gear burn out after promising starts? In Changing the Game, Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, two leading management consultants, reveal that the key to success lies in how you transform your organization.

Virtually all organizations face critical transition points in their life cycle, when they must change how they play the game, or perish. Flamholtz and Randle focus here on three critical moments: the move from entrepreneurial to professional management, when a firm reaches a stage of growth where it can no Longer operate in an informal, unstructured way; the revitalization of an established business that is Losing ground to competitors; and a radical change in a business vision. The authors show, for instance, how American Century Investors made the transformation from a ＄50 million entrepreneurship to a professionally managed company with a market value of ＄2 billion; how IBM, one of the great American corporations, was forced by the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s to overhaul its business to survive; and how Starbucks Coffee, originally a SeattLe coffee-bean store, was inspired by Milan’s romantic coffee bars to recreate itself and transformed an entire industry. The book concludes with a look at how one company -- Belt Carter Olive Company -- pulled together all the concepts and tools presented in the book and successfully changed the game.

Eric G. Flamholtz is Professor of Management at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. He is President, and Yvonne Randle is Vice President, of ManagementSystems Consulting Corporation, which has assisted organizations from entrepreneurships to Fortune 500 companies. They live in Los Angeles, California.