Abstract: American businesses are in a frantic race to grow and expand in fear of being gobbled up by their competitors. As a management consultant, I work with numerous companies across industries. The leaders of these companies have a lot in common — they feel intensely pressured to increase market share and revenues, reduce expenses, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately to increase profits.

In response to the pressures of a highly competitive marketplace, companies develop logical, well-planned change strategies to position themselves as advantageously as possible in order to compete successfully in today's and tomorrow's globally competitive marketplace. Communication is carefully planned to describe the compelling reasons for the changes, including the many benefits. Memos from senior managers are generated, newsletters, and other internal communication vehicles are distributed. Managers are coached how, when, and what to say to employees. Systems and facilities are reconfigured, and so on.

But who actually implements the changes? Who puts the plans into action or not? Employees, of course. To succeed in achieving their business objectives, companies need committed, energized, creative employees to put the change plans into place and to achieve success.

Unfortunately, there is increasing evidence that many organization change efforts, such as business process engineering, downsizing, and corporate mergers, are falling critically short of their objectives. Thee are numerous examples in business and academic journals of how strategic change efforts have resulted in mixed bottom-line results and have unintentionally demoralized and deflated the spirits of people in the organization. Hence, employees and other key stakeholders view subsequent change efforts as "more of the same" or "the fad of the hear." We have seen this with many total quality management initiatives.

So why aren't organizations working as well as they want and need to? Why do projects take so long yet fail to achieve any truly significant results? Why have our expectations for success diminished to the point that often the best we, as employees and managers, alike, hope for is "staying power" and patience to endure the disruptive forces that appear unpredictably in the organizations where we work?

This article authored by Laura Hauser addresses these questions and provides a case study that illustrates how the spirit of an organization was re-ignited by integrating the tangible and intangible dimensions of success.