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This article describes the emergence of change management as a service offering of major consulting firms. The authors compare change management with traditional organizational development (OD) in terms of theory and analytical framework, the role of the interventionist, and intervention strategies. They argue that change management has the potential to become a discipline that can unite the different "thought worlds" operating in the field of planned organizational change.
During the last decade, an increasing dissatisfaction with traditional organizational development (OD) has surfaced (Jelinek & Litterer, 1988). In his distinguished speaker address to the Academy of Management 6 years ago, Robert E. Quinn (1993) concluded that OD has become irrelevant. The demand for better ways of managing change is enormously high, but Quinn argued that the field is invisible to the majority of executives, that OD practitioners do not understand business, that there is little growth in OD departments, and that OD has failed to generate any interest among MBA students. He described a vision for a new profession based on the idea of "the legitimate change agent"-a person who should understand both the world of business and the world of human relationships.
We would argue, however, that there is no need for creating a new profession: The legitimate change agent is already here. Whereas Quinn (1993) talked about a vision for a new profession, today it is meaningful to speak about the emergence of a new profession. OD principles and techniques are experiencing a renaissance, thanks to the growth of the field of change management, which is dedicated to tackling the kind of large-scale change that Quinn described. We observe that the major consulting firms-- including those that in the past dealt exclusively with strategy or operations-now have separate divisions or competency groups specializing in change management; many of these have published books on the topic. Examples include "Real Change Agents" from McKinsey & Co. (Katzenbach & Becker, 1996), "Accelerating Change" from Arthur D. Little (Maira & Scott-Morgan, 1997), and "Transforming the Enterprise" from Gemini Consulting (Gouillart & Kelly, 1995). In terms of scale, Firm A is the leading firm, with approximately 5,000 professionals in its change management competency group and 53,000 consultants in total (see Table 1).1 The consulting firms that we spoke...