L et me start with a bold claim-despite the appearance of novelty, the approaches to managing change that have been advanced over the last 30 years are all variations on the same theme. They all belong to what a recent management book so aptly called change by "creative destruction" 1 -change that destroys and removes existing organizational assets in order to replace them with newly created ones. The examples abound: downsizing the number of employees, reengineering processes, revolutionizing structures, reacculturating entire workforces, or replacing social networks with computer networks.
Creative destruction tends to be a very disruptive and painful way of bringing about change-often so painful that it becomes virtually unsustainable. Indeed, a growing body of careful empirical research supports what may now seem obvious, that in many situations such highly destabilizing and painful changes can hurt more than they help. 2 What is needed is a less disruptive approach to change-one that provides for a sustained series of successful changes, enabling firms to adapt to their ever-changing environments without being torn apart.
This article describes an alternative to creative destruction that I call "creative recombination." Creative recombination begins with the assumption that firms already have inhouse many, if not most, of the elements that they need to bring about change. Rather than