Book excerpt: Change is inevitable, and how we handle it determines a great deal of our success in life. Fortunately, 10 Steps to Successful Change Management can help you understand change and take proactive steps toward dealing with it. With this handy go-to resource as your guide, you can understand and evaluate change, and apply practical tools that will help you not only cope with the inevitable, but benefit from it. Do you look forward to change, or do you face it with a sense of impending doom? Change is inevitable, and how we handle it determines a great deal of our success in life. Yet many people dread change, viewing it as a threat to be overcome rather than an opportunity to learn and grow. Fortunately, 10 Steps to Successful Change Management can help you understand change and take proactive steps toward dealing with it—whether it comes from technology, organizational shifts, economic or global trends, or simply the passage of time. With this handy go-to resource as your guide, you can understand and evaluate change, and apply practical tools that will help you not only cope with the inevitable, but benefit from it. This book can serve as a step-by-step program for systematically building your change management strategy, or you can turn directly to whichever chapter will help solve the problem at hand today. Either way, you'll be provided with insights, case studies, tools, and techniques to put you ahead of the change curve. You'll learn how to: develop a change management team and create supportive alliances communicate your plans, take your vision from idea to action, and overcome challenges along the way measure your success, review lessons learned, and build a culture of constant improvement. With 10 Steps to Successful Change Management at your fingertips, you'll be prepared to understand what's happening, minimize the risk that goes with it, and take advantage of the opportunities that change can bring. Instead of dreading the possibility that changes will occur, you'll be assured of your ability to handle them—and to thrive and grow through the experience.