Change Management: 1

I’m currently undertaking the Change Management Institute Foundation level course and formalizing the experience from the many projects and initiatives I’ve been involved with in my time in publishing. I started working in publishing in 2004, and it is fair to say that publishing has changed in that time – quite a lot. I personally have been part of project teams and trainer teams that helped the organizations I worked for move from point A to point B. Listening, learning and talking were always a key tripos in that process.

As I work through the course and the Effect Change Manager’s Handbook, I’ll write up some words that will hopefully be of use. The book starts out by noting how ‘interdisciplinary’ the field is and its fitting that my most recent post, as Publisher at Rowman and Littlefield International, involved heading up the editorial department at a interdisciplinary publisher – and striving to work out what that means, and how best to implement it in a concrete publishing programme. We sold, still, into silos – academic disciplines, third party wholesalers and distributors and the invariably tricky world of BIC and BISAC. So how might we improve? I’ll try to set out some ways we achieved that and some of the lessons I learned.