Strategic Change Management Program wraps up in Oman

Oman's College of Banking and Financial Studies partnered with Queen's School of Business in Canada to offer a three-day Strategic Change Management Program last week in Muscat, Oman.

The goal of the program was to assist its 22 attendees in developing ideas for positive changes in the organizations they represented. The major themes of the program were understanding challenges brought on by changes, fostering an atmosphere in which positive change can occur, ways to make changes quickly but smoothly, getting through resistance to change and putting change into action.

The program was led by Queen's School of Business Associate Dean of MBA and Master's Programs Elspeth Murray.

"The success rate is very low for major organizational changes such as culture change, integrating acquisitions, launching new products and services or implementing new IT platforms," Murray said. "Much of the accepted conventional wisdom about change, such as taking it slowly, and getting everyone on board at the outset, is misleading in today’s fast-paced business environment. A new framework for organizational change is needed by many organizations. Executives now have to ask what has to be done to establish the winning conditions that maximize the likelihood of success in these risky endeavors.”