Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness

In this groundbreaking book, organizational effectiveness experts Edward Lawler and Christopher Worley show how organizations can be “built to change” so they can last and succeed in today’s global economy. Instead of striving to create a highly reliable Swiss watch that consistently produces the same behavior, they argue organizations need to be designed in ways that stimulate and facilitate change. Built to Change focuses on identifying practices and designs that organizations can adopt so that they are able to change. As Lawler and Worley point out, organizations that foster continuous change

• Are closely connected to their environments
• Reward experimentation
• Learn about new practices and technologies
• Commit to continuously improving performance
• Seek temporary competitive advantages

About the Authors

EDWARD E. LAWLER III is Distinguished Professor of Business and director of the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC). He joined USC in 1978 and founded and became director of the university’s Center for Effective Organizations in 1979. He has consulted with over one hundred organizations on employee involvement, organizational change, corporate board effectiveness, and compensation, and has been honored as a top contributor to the fields of organizational development, organizational behavior, and compensation.

Lawler has written over three hundred articles, and this is thirty-eighth book. His articles have appeared in leading academic journals as well as in Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and leading newspapers. His most recent books include Rewarding Excellence ( Jossey-Bass, 2000), Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top ( Jossey-Bass, 2001), Organizing for High Performance ( Jossey-Bass, 2001), Treat People Right! ( Jossey-Bass, 2003), Creating a Strategic Human Resources Organization (Stanford Press, 2003), and Human Resources Business Process Outsourcing ( Jossey-Bass, 2004).

CHRISTOPHER G. WORLEY (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. Between 1997 and 2005, he served as director of the Master of Science in Organization Development (MSOD) program at Pepperdine University. He was the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Fellow from 1995 to 2000 and continues as a core faculty member in the MSOD program. His publications include more than twenty articles and chapters, as well as two books: Integrated Strategic Change (Addison-Wesley, 1996) and Organization Development and Change (Southwestern, 2005).

Worley served as chair for the Organization Development and Change Division and as the Interactive Paper Program chair for the Academy of Management. He is on the advisory board of the Wiley Series on Organization Change and Development and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Strategic Management Education and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. His recent consulting clients include Microsoft, Infonet, American Healthways, British Petroleum, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.