How to Change How We Change
This is not a traditional “culture” book.
It is a challenge to the industrial-age assumptions, management habits, and organizational myths that still dominate how companies attempt to create change.
The core argument is simple:
We cannot expect different cultures, different behaviors, or different outcomes if we keep using the same mindsets and mechanisms that created the current reality in the first place.
Why organizational change fails
Most organizational change efforts fail not because people resist change, but because organizations keep applying mechanistic, behavior-first, incentive-heavy approaches.
A different way of thinking
Rather than offering another “culture framework,” the book proposes a different way of thinking about organizations, leadership, motivation, trust, alignment, and value creation.
Historical critique
Several themes are reinforced through contemporary evidence and historical critique, including trust erosion and insularity in society and the limits of incentive-based motivation.
A chapter by chapter breakdown.
1. Change Does Not Take Time
2. Beliefs, Then Behaviors
3. The Snake Oil of Engagement
4. Talking About Change Doesn’t Change Anything
5. Res, Non Verba
6. You Cannot Engineer Change
7. You Must Manage What You Cannot Measure
8. Profit, On Purpose
9. Things Only Have One Center
10. Too Big for HR
11. Beliefs, Intentions, Promises, and Actions
12. Wagging the Tail Won’t Make the Dog Happy
13. Culture: A New Definition
14. What Doesn’t Build, Breaks
15. Movement Is Not Motivation
16. About Time
Culture is not a soft HR topic. It’s one of the most strategic business variables of the next decade.
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