The methods used by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to promote health in a West Virginia city can also be used to raise organizational performance.

Jeanie Duck is known for mixing Southern charm and sass with business insight and acumen. For the past three decades, she has used that mixture to good advantage in helping companies initiate change and make it stick. Duck recently retired as a senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group, but not without leaving behind ten lessons from her long career.

Fundamental change is painful. The intellectual and logistical challenges may be daunting, but the emotional confusion and chaos created during such change can virtually paralyze an organization. In today’s turbulent environment, however, change is not optional. Farsighted leaders endeavor to use times like these to sprint past their less nimble competitors. In order to capitalize on potential new opportunities, such leaders are able to harness the latent power of their organization and their people by following five basic tenets.

Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for a transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in implementing and embedding change.

How do you oil the wheels to make change continuous? The key is managing interdependencies that allow a required level of flex. One of the facilitating factors is understanding what it is that contributes to those flows of information; what is it that maintains that business process and the integrity of that business process? And if we look at the input to output to value relationships that exist there, oiling those resources and oiling those connections – managing those interdependencies really effectively is what enables reaction to ceaseless change events. Understanding interdependencies and adjusting them removes a lot of the constraints and allows change to happen unimpeded.

Start using it instead — to reinforce and build the new behaviors that will give you the high-performance company you want.

Bain analyzed the barriers to successful change management at 184 global companies. The study enabled us to identify predictable patterns of risks in a broad cross-section of change efforts. We found, for example, that about 65 percent of initiatives required significant behavioral change on the part of employees-something that managers often fail to consider and plan for in advance. Nearly 60 percent of the companies we analyzed lacked the right capabilities to deliver on their change plans. The same percentage of companies didn't have the appropriate individuals, structures and decision-making processes to drive the change initiatives. In addition, about 60 percent lacked the right metrics and incentives to make change efforts successful. And more than 63 percent of the companies faced high risks to their change efforts because of significant communications gaps between the leaders of the effort and the employees most affected by it.

These findings reinforce what decades of experience with clients have shown us: companies usually fall prey to three common change management myths, which lead to a superficial approach to change initiatives. Many companies assume they can get it done, for instance, with the right combination of strong incentives for their leaders and overlook the importance of building employee commitment during a change effort. The 30 percent of companies that succeed take a radically different course of action. They know that success requires leaders to learn and apply some counterintuitive strategies to change. Let's take a look at each one in turn.

Editor's Note: the best change management article I have read recently

There’s nothing quite as common as watching an established organization—a company that reached great heights in one era of technology, markets, and culture—struggle to regain its stature as a force for leadership in a new era. The work of deep-seated, sustainable change remains the hardest work there is. That’s why, over the past two years, I immersed myself in the struggles and triumphs of 25 organizations that are achieving dramatic results under some of the most trying conditions imaginable. I was privy to the strategies and tactics of a diverse collection of innovators in a wide variety of fields.

These innovators were not paralyzed by the degree of difficulty associated with their agenda. In fact, they were energized by it. They were making big things happen in new ways—unleashing innovations and driving transformations that will shape the fortunes of their organizations and the future of their fields. In the process, they developed a set of principles that define the work of leaders in every field. Here are four of those principles—simple rules for transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself.

Successful change, being effective, involves three things: structuring change, managing change and leading change. I call this The Golden Triangle of Change.

Editor's Note: one of the best change related articles I have read recently.

Instead of implementing periodic change programs, tomorrow’s success stories will adapt constantly to new trends and directions. But how does a company develop this capability? Accenture discusses the competencies, structures, leadership tenets and performance metrics that enable companies to change rapidly and organically.

Advantage is transient but companies are sticky: That’s why smart strategy should start with your capabilities and then seek a market for them, rather than beginning from the pot of gold and hoping you can walk upon the rainbow to where you are. By the same token, in a conflict between strategy and culture, culture eventually wins. Always.

That being the case, the only way to succeed is to prevent a conflict between strategy and culture. I didn’t say “change the culture.” I said stop fighting it. Instead, leverage it, judo-wise. There is no revolution without cultural revolution. But cultural revolution, as Mao Tse-tung failed to understand, cannot be won if it’s forced from above.

Most leaders don't realize that mindset and behavior are the twin drivers of change.

When organizational transformations succeed, managers typically pay attention to “people issues,” especially fostering collaboration among leaders and employees and building capabilities.

Find a bright spot and clone it.

That's the first step to fixing everything from addiction to corporate malaise to malnutrition. A problem may look hopelessly complex. But there's a game plan that can yield movement on even the toughest issues. And it starts with locating a bright spot -- a ray of hope.

Program management is now the preferred vehicle for bringing about major organizational and strategic change in many sectors. Unfortunately, former project managers entrusted with major programs are frequently not up to the task.

Here are nine questions you can ask to increase engagement when leading change.

Editor's Note: read the comments for some additional useful questions.

Can 'Complexity Theory' explain why strategies and change programs seldom deliver the results that were intended? Does it mean that we should leave everything to chance and abandon any attempts to shape our organizations for the future? In this article Dr Jean Boulton and Dr Peter Allen, from Cranfield's Complex Systems Management Centre, explain how this 'new science' can be used by managers to rethink their approaches to strategy and change management.

Most change programs fail, but the odds of success can be greatly improved by taking into account these counter-intuitive insights about how employees interpret their environment and choose to act.

New leaders want to put their stamp on an organization -- but it's often better for their egos than for their companies. Change for its own sake causes cynicism and resistance among the rank and file. And all too frequently, it's harmful or worse for organizational performance.

Research shows that most transformation leaders go unpromoted, unrecognized, and unrewarded. And their companies suffer in the long run.

Over the next year or two, companies will face substantial challenges. As the recession deepens, the battlefield will shift from great ideas and strategies to strongest execution. The companies that will prove to be successful will be equipped with action plans grounded in practical targets and tools to overcome key obstacles and inefficiencies.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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The inventory tool is the companion to the book The Amaryllis Way - Growing Leaders Who Grow Leaders, a leadership parable that describes a philosophy of leadership. The inventory tool builds on the concepts from the book and seeks to identify your leadership approach. It is designed to help you and members of your team reflect on how you grow people or where you may be deficient. With a healthy dose of honesty, it can provide insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and establish a basis for discussing how to develop people as leaders and as members of a team.

This article examines issues surrounding technological change, including three types of norms (formal, informal, technical) and six rules of thumb for successful adaptation.

A carefully constructed change agent program is essential to any successful operational transformation.

Organizational change is a much discussed topic in the management literature. It is an important issue because proper change management significantly increases the survival an organization in hyper-competitive global business environment. Yet, all too often transformational change programs fail due to a variety of reasons. The purpose of this paper is to describe change from different angles and to utilize the literature information to identify key components of organizational change in order to develop a "Model of Strategically Balanced Change". The author argues that transformational change is a balancing act and should involve the entire workforce. This paper is essentially an information guide about organizational change that can be used by decision makers in industry and nonprofit organizations, by business consultants, and by business educators and students in academia. [BNET Annotation]