Reviews

The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture by Paul Gibbons

pupandpint's review against another edition

1.0

I couldn't finish this book. I am a project manager implementing digital solutions, so the content intrigued me, but there is no way that I can force myself to sit through the pain of continuing to read this book. This book was so poorly edited that it distracted from my ability to focus on the content. Comma misuse runs rampant and punctuation with parentheses is inconsistently applied. I find it utterly ironic that the author frequently berates "the establishment" (i.e. Harvard Business Review) for publishing without peer review and by the looks of it the author himself couldn't find anyone to peer review his work from a purely structural and grammatical standpoint, let alone from a content perspective. And then the content...the book is poorly marked with regards to footnotes in order to find the supporting work cited for any given passage of text. This is especially disconcerting when the author inserts his own (holier-than-thou) observations without much delineation between published and documented information and his own ideas that even he admits he has not had the ability to test in reality. I flipped to the bibliography (correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was supposed to be "works cited" by now?) and it was poorly formatted for e-reader to the point that it's unusable as a reference for my own investigation.

This could be a great book and I do believe the content would be important if written well and properly supported by both supposition and science. However, as it is currently written (and "edited"--there is no way to express how loosely I use that term here), it is difficult to extract any real or actionable value from the book.