Novotel Changes Management
geLong Range Planning 33 (2000) 779-804
www.elsevier.com/locate/lrp
Managing Change at Novotel: Back to the Future
Roland Calori, Charles Baden-Fuller and Brian Hunt
Novotel is one of the world’s major hotel chains, occupying a leading place in Europe and with locations globally. We interpret Novotel’s change management programme in the 1990s in three parts. First, we summarise the actions that managers took in terms of strategy and organisation. Second, we consider the sequence and timing of events, and how this resulted in rapid transformation in an organisation employing more than 30,000 people. Third, we emphasise the dialectical nature of the change processes: an element often ignored in the literature that likes to see things as an either–or rather than a both. We observed both deliberation and experimentation; both integration and differentiation. We also observed both preservation and transformation, as noted in our sub-title ‘Back to the Future’. Finally, we wrap up with a discussion explaining how our story can add to better thinking about change. We suggest that we can shed new light on some old debates and provide tangible guides for action. k 2001 Elsevier Science c Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The study of organisational dynamics has produced innumerable accounts and theoretical frameworks, and yet neither practitioners nor scholars seem to be satisfied with the stock of existing knowledge. This is probably because organisational changes are complex phenomena that can be viewed from different and complementary perspectives.1 Each perspective reveals different angles. Here we focus on the insights from a longitudinal process perspective.2 In this paper we reflect on the particular scenario of strategic change which took place at Novotel, the international three-star hotel chain which is part of the Accor Group of France, between 1992 and 1995. Accor has been established for more than 20 years and has been evolving continuously to
www.elsevier.com/locate/lrp
Managing Change at Novotel: Back to the Future
Roland Calori, Charles Baden-Fuller and Brian Hunt
Novotel is one of the world’s major hotel chains, occupying a leading place in Europe and with locations globally. We interpret Novotel’s change management programme in the 1990s in three parts. First, we summarise the actions that managers took in terms of strategy and organisation. Second, we consider the sequence and timing of events, and how this resulted in rapid transformation in an organisation employing more than 30,000 people. Third, we emphasise the dialectical nature of the change processes: an element often ignored in the literature that likes to see things as an either–or rather than a both. We observed both deliberation and experimentation; both integration and differentiation. We also observed both preservation and transformation, as noted in our sub-title ‘Back to the Future’. Finally, we wrap up with a discussion explaining how our story can add to better thinking about change. We suggest that we can shed new light on some old debates and provide tangible guides for action. k 2001 Elsevier Science c Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The study of organisational dynamics has produced innumerable accounts and theoretical frameworks, and yet neither practitioners nor scholars seem to be satisfied with the stock of existing knowledge. This is probably because organisational changes are complex phenomena that can be viewed from different and complementary perspectives.1 Each perspective reveals different angles. Here we focus on the insights from a longitudinal process perspective.2 In this paper we reflect on the particular scenario of strategic change which took place at Novotel, the international three-star hotel chain which is part of the Accor Group of France, between 1992 and 1995. Accor has been established for more than 20 years and has been evolving continuously to