Abstract This paper summarizes three articles. The first two pertain to organizational change and the last one to human resources with respect to the global organization. The first article provides a history of organizational change as a discipline, some statistics that illustrate the challenges associated with organizational change, and some of the best practices for how to make organizational change successful in an organization. The second article is specific to McDonald's, highlighting that company's struggles to effect organizational change. Management's view of what change looks like is not really aligned with the views of the franchisees, and in general this has left the franchisees critical. This is a case study is how not to implement a successful organizational change program. The third article is about the role that human resources plays in the development of the global organization, in particular with respect to training.

Outline

Change Statistics

McDonalds

HR Role in Cultural Intelligence

Change Statistics

The Change Missionaries article appears in Human Capital, and it provides almost an infographic-style overview of strategic change initiatives, using material from several different sources. The article notes that change management came into fashion as a discipline in the 1980s, and it was enterprise that formed the early adopters, seeking to resolve a pain point around making organizational changes happen.

The seminal work in change management was published in 1996 by John Kotter, and this research revealed that only 30% of change programs succeed. By the 2000s, organizational change was formalized as a discipline, and fully accepted in business., but despite this, and increased training, the statistic of roughly one-third of change programs succeeding continued to hold true.

The paper then covers some statistics around change management. One of these is that 14.9% of money spend on change initiatives is lost due to failed efforts. Because of the high failure rate of change initiatives. One of the major issues is that many within the organization are simply not sufficiently motivated to change. As an example, it takes at least 75% of the leadership of the organization to accept that business as usual is no longer acceptable in order for a change initiative to succeed. Leadership buy-in, therefore, has been identified as a key part of change management.

The paper also contains a number of different case studies, mainly from enterprise, highlighting some of their change efforts and views on change efforts. The next section covers the benchmark practices...

These include communication, providing clear direction throughout the organization, and creating a mandate for change. Making sure that the employees are ready to embrace new ideas is a key theme, ultimately it is the employees who will have to implement the changes.
One of the issues identified is that simply training managers about organizational change is not enough. Change is not something that can be executed with theory – it is a daily effort. As such, change requires not only training on techniques, but also requires a fair bit of commitment as well. Part of ensuring organizational commitment falls to the communication problem. Organizational change is almost always top-down, and the further down in the management ranks one goes, the less the managers typically get the message of change. This makes it difficult to implement the change through the majority of the workforce, if their manager neither understands the change, why it needs to happen, nor what role he or she might play in executing that change.

The overall statistics regarding organizational change are generally not good. While American companies are the most adaptable in the world according to a wide-ranging study, they still do not perform particularly well with respect to organizational change. This is interesting in the sense that while we are learning a lot more about change, putting that knowledge into practice is not necessarily occurring as quickly nor as easily as one might hope. There is clearly more to learn about the execution of organizational change initiatives.

McDonalds

The second article, about McDonald's, begins with the premise that many people within the organization – franchisees – feel that the brand is on its last legs. The point out that 30% of the operators are insolvent, and that there is little changing at the company to address the changes in the external environment.

The company had instituted a turnaround plan, including things like all-day breakfast and digital ordering kiosks, did not address the core problems that the company is facing. The franchisees argue that the company is moving "from one failed initiative to another", stemming from the reality that the initiatives are not transforming the company in any meaningful way.

The company is facing a crisis, highlighted by the insolvency of so many franchisees and seven consecutive quarters of same store sales declines in the US. The response from the company has come with a number of tactical initiatives. Even when they are received well by the customer base, such as with the…