In The End Summary

After all, the rest of the book concentrates on a change in the organizations and individual' life. This starts with a presupposition of a dynamic and overlapping image of change. Bridges offer another perspective, the organizational life cycle, and believes that this provides an important way to understand transitions. Within this perspective, a map of the organization's life cycle resembles the human development and shows the path an organization follows like we can observe by looking at human life from childhood to adulthood. There are seven comparable stages of organizational life and these seven stages represent fixed times in an organization's life: dreaming the dream; launching the venture; getting organized; making it; becoming an institution;

This part of the book starts with its own critique about the image of transition. That is to say, transitions are discussed in terms of its ideal image which are also the pure and simple forms. However, they are isolated from constantly changing the environment of the real world. Therefore, we have to leave behind the image of the isolated transition and deal with the real ones. For instance, conceptual picture of transition is drawn with the three phases of transition, although each phase is not separate and does not have clear boundaries -at this juncture, Bridges reminds that each of these phases starts before the preceding one is finished, and this makes us to feel one of these phases at the same time, but there is a dominance of one phase over the other two rather than an absolute shift. For leaders, Bridges suggests that the first that they have to do is an overall design within which the various and separate changes are integrated as component elements and thinking organization's history as a life history may be helpful. The hardest thing is the acceleration of the pace of change. Herein, changing lots of things makes sense if everything is an interrelated whole. In order to be ready for the future, forecasting the change Bridges offers two kinds of forecasting: the first is to do life-cycle forecasts on the organizational policies and structures; secondly,