p.109: Like a personal credit card statement showing prior purchase decisions, magnitude discloses the number and character of the initiatives that management has determined were important enough to pursue. market turbulence would be equivalent to the number of purchasable items the customer had access to, not the number actually bought.
p.110: Despite all the rhetoric about participation, in order to protect themselves from the growing ease with which employees offer their options and ideas, many executives have all but shut down the corridor between themselves and their employees’ useful input. (cf.: Building Blocks of Empowerment)
p.111: remember, magnitude is discretionary in that management must make a decision to implement a change before it is added to the actual transition burden for an organization.
p.112: (Cascade) The least reliable group to ask about how much change is really taking place in an organization is senior management. They tend to think their organization’s magnitude is equivalent to the projects they have approved and announced. Not only do they vastly overestimate the number of their initiatives that survive the fall through layer after layer of gatekeepers to the first-line supervisors, they usually are oblivious to the many changes that are engaged locally at each level of the descent.
p.113 (momentum) Just because a person who has a strong capacity to absorb disruption and who can operate in ambiguous situations happens to also be the CEO, this does not necessarily mean the rest of the organization is similarly prepared.
p.115 (complexity) Eventually, all living systems either grow and become more complicated and perplexing, or they die. … Generally speaking, as the complexity of the changes an organization attempts increases, so does the rate of failure.
p.117 (consequences) The most reliable predictor of commitment is the price people believe they will pay if they fail to achieve their change. … the success of any major change effort is directly tied to the severity of the price for the status quo.
p.121: Despite the commitment rhetoric that may have been thrown about, if an endeavor fails to achieve its stated objective and management believes that it can pay what is perceived to be no more than a moderate amount for the collapse, the project is doomed.