Acknowledgements

Well, all I can say is that this has been a long time coming. I had the idea for this book almost ten years ago but it took the ten-day business book proposal challenge by Alison Jones at Practical Inspiration Publishing to get it out of my head and onto the page. Thank you to Michelle Parry-Slater for signposting me to Alison in the first place; she is brilliant.

Being the CEO of a software business while writing a book is a challenge, so I must first thank my husband and business partner Chris Carney and the whole team at Actus Software who kept everything ticking over brilliantly when my head had to be in the book rather than in the business. Thanks particularly to Gemma Scott, who has had the joy of editing various aspects of my business writing and politely calls me out when I don’t make sense. Huge thanks also to my neighbour and good friend Will Cameron, who stepped in at the final hour when I had bitten off more than I could chew regarding editing the manuscript – even if he has edited out all the exclamation marks except this one!

Much of my early experience around managing change came from my internal learning and organizational development roles at Siemens and Pfizer. Since 2009 this has multiplied through my consultancy work at Advance Change Ltd (which also trades as Actus). This has given me access to hundreds of public, private and not-for-profit organizations with countless different People Professionals (Change Superheroes) dealing with their own cultural challenges. Thank you to everyone who has contributed with their experiences and challenges, which have taught me so much and hopefully enriched this book for others by sharing real examples.

My teenage children Emma and Sammy should be recognized for being so positive and supportive as well as patient with the ‘Mummy has to write her book now’ interruptions to this year’s summer holiday and countless weekends. The fact that they are vaguely impressed that I have written and published a book means a lot to me. Unfortunately, neither of my parents are alive to see this but my father Dr David Harley was a huge book lover and I would hope that seeing his daughter make it into print would also have made him very proud.

I’m a huge pragmatist so I have tried to keep this book as accessible and practical as possible. With this in mind, at the end of each chapter there is a short case study designed to illustrate some of the points made within that chapter. I have kept them anonymous to protect the innocent; however, I would like to extend sincere thanks to the following contributors: Kim Bradford, Willorna Brock, Teresa Cameron, Karen Gill, Steve Graham, Sophie Haylock, Cat Hase, Steve Jones, Craig Marshall, Ali Nutley, Jennifer Scherler and Fran Trousdale. Thank you to Sheila Lardner, a long-time training colleague and friend, for the blue-bag-and-potatoes analogy and other inspiration, and to Grant Whiteing for the illustrations.

Finally, thanks to you, the reader, for picking this book out of all the others that you could have chosen. I truly hope that you find it practical and inspiring.