SPEAK UP OR STAY STUCK

Consultant Marmon presents a concise guidebook to managing change in the workplace.

In these pages, the author addresses what many professionals consider a potential nightmare: Their organization is undergoing a major shift, and they’re the ones tasked with implementing sweeping changes, regardless of obstacles and without complaint. Often, it also means delivering lots of bad news. Drawing on her own experience as a CEO and consultant as well as on many interviews she’s conducted with senior leaders over the years, Marmon urges her readers to avoid thinking of themselves as victims but rather to embrace changes as empowering things: “You have control over your work,” she writes. “Change is not happening to you; change is happening for you.” She views statements such as “I’m just a cog in the wheel” as declarations of weakness and urges her target readership of middle managers to reject such passive framing in favor of more active engagement with the process of transformation: “If you don’t find strength and courage to move forward,” she asserts, “your past will remain your present.” Marmon's approach of fixing problems by addressing the fears from which they spring is a refreshingly personal one, and many managers caught in a bind will welcome it. Unfortunately, the book is weakened by its tendency toward gnomic little proverbs, such as “You may be right, but you'll never know for sure unless you act,” which occur far too often in these pages. Such familiar slogans tend to dilute what is otherwise a bracing underlying message: “I want to help you find your voice,” she writes, “discover your courage, grow your confidence, reclaim your power, and increase your influence.”

An inspirational, inward-looking book about adjusting to a new normal, undermined somewhat by occasionally bland prose.