Much before Barack Obama used it to galvanise his presidential election, change had been the management pundit?s favourite muse. From Dale Carnegie to John Kotter to CK Prahlad, management gurus, at some point or the other, have endorsed the inevitability, as well as indispensability, of change. So when Sujaya Banerjee?s Switch: How 12 Indian Companies Managed Change Successfully hit the stands, it came with the usual apprehensions surrounding any book centred around the ubiquitous ?C? word?it could be old wine in a new bottle. The fears are not entirely misplaced, but to approach the book with such an assumption runs the risk of missing the point.
The book, which dwells upon human resource (HR) success stories, is true to its title. It?s only the content that disappoints. Since the book is based on entries sent by companies, including Dr Reddy?s, Capgemini, Wipro, Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra, on how they handled change to tackle a problem, it contains only what the companies chose to reveal formally. It isn?t, therefore, an objective study of their performances. With no perceptible efforts having gone into backing their claims with solid data and bolder facts in most cases, especially about the impact of change, the entries lack the authenticity of an authoritative management book.
Moreover, while the nature of the problem faced by a company is somewhat well-documented, the successful handling of change is described by using a plethora of mindless jargons without specific focus on what exactly a company did differently to boost performance.
Take the instance of Dr Reddy?s. For some years up to 2011, the book says, the pharmaceutical major noticed that most of its sales staff were leaving the company within three-six months of joining. After introspection, it surfaced that the attrition was a result of a not-so-robust hiring process and ?premiums? enjoyed by employees in the market. The company formulated a ?one-day competency based interviewing skills workshop as a structured training intervention?. It also ?introduced technology assisted induction for lateral hires to enable seamless integration?.
Switch disappoints because it just reproduces the entries of HR professionals of these companies, who surely have lost touch with writing. Perhaps it would have been a good idea had the author rewritten the entries herself in a more interesting manner. The promise of a good read, built up by the preface and blurb of the book, doesn?t last through the pages.
The best part is that the book doesn?t make any pretensions of being a prospective bestseller and due credit has been given to professionals of each company for the entries they have submitted. However, as any reader of Dale Carnegie?s books knows, anecdotes are an indispensable part of their popularity. But Switch, with its superficial depiction of the success stories, replete with boring jargons and narrated without any engrossing anecdotes, jeopardises its chances of appealing to a broader audience beyond the last apprentice at a management academy out to hone his skills against all odds.