Oil and paint
Credit: Paweł Czerwiński

7 Books on Managing Change

Reframing challenges as opportunity

Joanna Ngai
2 min readMay 3, 2021

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Resilience is a global theme for the last year. Stress and crisis force us to confront the difficult reality of reacting to change and novel transitions.

How does one bounce back from trials and use those experiences to improve the future? How might a leader create positive change and what challenges may hinder it? Here’s some books to help you reframe upcoming changes.

  1. The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough (Samuel Bacharach)
    Mindsets for how to bring others along with your ideas by their pace of change and openness that lie at the heart of any innovation.
  2. The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions (James Kuhn)
    Though not directly relevant to organizational change, Kuhn shares his perspective on the importance of history in understanding the nature of scientific progress.
  3. Leading Change (John Kotter)
    Stages of leading organization change: creating the environment for change, communicating vision and sustaining change over time.
  4. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Chip Heath, Dan Heath)
    Rationally directing our inner ‘elephant’, the emotional part of us that resists change.

Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And…

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