The 7 Levels of Change: The Secrets Used by the World's Largest Corporations to Create, Innovate and Motivate

I found this book while purchasing another book. I took a gamble and bought them both. It was the better of the two. Smith provides a structure, understanding, and tools the enable rapid implementation. This books does more than make you feel good. I am looking forward to telling others about it and putting its ideas to work.

This book is one of the best I've read about how to change the way you think and do work in the business world. It triggers a lot of ideas about how to capture and develop ideas for commercial value, and it gives you a framework for actually "doing something different". There are many good examples for personal and professional growth, and for organizational development. Corporate Leadership Development programs should include it as "required reading", and as a guide to showing employees just what it looks and feels like to be a leader (a Thought Leader) in today's fickle, ever-changing business environment. Use it like a true WORKBOOK; write in it, skip around, make slides from it, experiment with it, copy parts of it - rewrite it in your own thoughts and words!

I currently use this book as a text for an interdisciplinary Graduate level course at Penn State University. The students come from a variety of backgrounds including Engineering, Management and Education, and they rave about this book! Not only does it provide powerful tools for "thinking different" and "thinking about thinking", but it also gives plenty of dynamic examples of how real people use these tools in the real world. My students give this book an A+ and so do I!

Change is a part of life, yet most of the books on this subject tell you how to deal with the aftermath, as its victim. In this energizing book, Rolf Smith's energizing style helps you chart your path, be it personal or corporate. Not the typical institutional disection of subject material, Smith's book is as alive as his lectures: daring you to get involved in creating your future and push the envelope on your limits. The book is full of information but light enought that a quick read will get you into and bring you back for more. Truly a handbook for change agents!

The toughest things to change in any business are your people and their processes. Today's fast changing environment is sending us tremendous amounts of information to digest and respond to. These changes can prove overwhelming without an enlightened leader to mark the path for their business organization. Rolf Smith has examined the necessary steps to lead every member of your organization, regardless of style or personality, through the enormous, necessary changes required of all successful businesses. The expression, "Change, or Die" has never had more meaning than today. This book proved very useful to my organization's implementation of new software systems. We were able to develop several approaches to accommodate the different learning styles/types based on Mr. Smith's observations and recommendations. Excellent read, entertaining, well organized and especially appreciated the wide margins to allow us to use this book as a workbook as well! The margins are full and immensely valuable to our group. We've all added comments to a plan that was tested against the book...chapter by chapter. I highly recommend this book and look forward to any additional future books by this author. Mr. Smith, kudos and thanks for the margins...excellent, excellent change...it's graduated from our bookshelf to our desktop...we have plans to use it with our consulting clients to document and develop their own successful plans for change!