Leading Change in a Web 2.1 World: How Changecasting Builds Trust, Creates Understanding, and Accelerates Organizational Change

Recent advances in Web 2.0 technology enable new leadership processes and guidelines that can create great value for organizations. In this important new book—the first title in the new Brookings series on Innovations in Leadership—management expert Jackson Nickerson proposes a combination of processes and guidelines utilizing Web 2.0 technology, which he refers to as Web 2.1, that not only will lead and direct change in an organization but actually accelerate it. He calls this set of processes and guidelines "Change-Casting," and it should be an important part of any organization's leadership toolkit.

Leading Change in a Web 2.1 World provides fresh insights into why people and organizations are so difficult to engage in change. It explains how web-based video communications, when used in accordance with ChangeCasting principles, can be a keyway for building trust and creating understanding in an organization, thereby unlocking and accelerating organizational change.

Nickerson introduces us to two Fortune 1000 firms facing dire economic and competitive circumstances. Both CEOs attempted extensive organizational change using web-based video communications, but one used ChangeCasting while the other did not—Nickerson details how ChangeCasting produced positive financial results for the former. He also discusses how ChangeCasting principles were used so successfully by the Barack Obama presidential campaign in 2008.

The insights presented here will be invaluable to business executives, public officials, students of management and organizations, and anyone who needs to take organizational change from the drawing board to successful implementation and replication.

The Innovations In Leadership series, a collaboration of the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis and the Brookings Institution Press, offers books that are succinct, action-oriented, and pragmatic, focused on a wide range of problems facing business and government leaders today. Each title will offer practical approaches and innovative solutions to meet present-day challenges.

Jackson Nickerson is the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also director of the Brookings Executive Education program and a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Nickerson is editor of the Innovations in Leadership series.