As we move into summer, change has been on my mind.

Sitting on my desk is a copy of the Harvard Business Review’s June issue, the cover of which promotes a series of articles titled “Managing Change: How to Do It, When to Do It.”

I found great value in the article “Change for Change’s Sake,” which begins on page 71. The article compares companies to the human body. The piece then examines how managers can identify and eliminate buildups of “corporate cholesterol,” which are “human dynamics that limit communication, creativity, and efficient resource allocation.”

(I suspect you know what comparison I’m about to make here: The human dynamics that the traditional budgeting process causes certainly qualify as corporate cholesterol.)

Sitting on my bedside table is a copy of Switch, the best-selling business book by Dan Heath and Chip Heath. This happens to be the current selection in The Player Group’s monthly book club. Our staff is reading and discussing the book to gain insights into how well we manage change, how we might manage change more effectively, and how we might help our clients and members address their own planning-related change challenges.

We are finding the book to be instructive and enjoyable. Here’s how the coauthors describe their argument:

In this book, we argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of change to do three things at once: To change someone’s behavior, you’ve got to change that person’s situation. … [Change] is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. … If you want people to change, you must provide crystal clear direction. … [What] looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

Good food for thought as we begin the summer. ###