MEGACHANGE: How Today's Leading Companies Have Transformed Their Workforces

In the last decade, organizations have spent billions of dollars on attempts to improve productivity. But while 85 percent of U.S.-based corporations engaged in some form of restructuring, most of these changes failed. Indeed, 44 percent of the companies reported that the situation actually worsened. The reason, explains William Joyce, is that traditional methods for designing and changing organizations have been based on an assumption of human limitations -- a premise that buries creativity in bureaucracy and useless systems and procedures, and denies employees' needs for satisfying work.

Megachange prescribes a very different journey -- from a new starting point defined by a person's strengths. Joyce's "New Logic for Change" is composed of four critical steps: Empowering the Workforce, Engaging Systems, Reforming Structures, and Redirecting Strategy. Developed while the author was guiding large-scale change at Nabisco and Citibank and at Aetna during its acquisition of U.S. Healthcare, the Megachange system creates an organizational culture that emphasizes human values and is based on meaningful work, not just the bottom line.