Change management

Cultures can only evolve.

When business conditions change, the most successful companies are often the slowest to adapt. To avoid being left behind, executives must understand the true sources of corporate inertia.

How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen

Three common mistakes to avoid.

When an executive comes from the private sector to a nonprofit, the usual understanding is that he or she is there to inject some business discipline. When I arrived at the American Red Cross, there were certainly problems to be tackled. The books were closed on FY08 just six days after I started, with a […]

Researchers studied backlash to change at five elite law firms — and how leadership eventually won the skeptics over.

As IBM celebrates its 100th birthday, many observers are rightly calling attention to the many strategic changes the company put itself through to remain relevant amidst dramatic technological and economic change. But one of the biggest transformations IBM went through is less about computers and more about culture. Over the last decade and a half, […]

Just because this is a time of transformation doesn’t mean that it’s easy to sell transformational ideas. Economic uncertainty has reduced the audience for bold, grand rhetoric. Besides, even in boom times innovation is risky. Innovators often have to ease anxieties by sounding conservative while doing something radical. We all want breakthroughs; it’s just that […]

Denial dogged my travels around the world these past weeks. At a World Economic Forum gathering in Dubai just before Dubai World’s debt problems made headlines, the head Sheikh touted Dubai’s superiority over the West for problems that Dubai had seemingly avoided. But the idle cranes and empty buildings I saw were monuments to denial […]

When a crisis forces outside directors to navigate major changes, investors and directors must adopt new roles. The largest such case to date provides some useful lessons. The Royal Dutch/Shell Group was a 60/40 joint venture between Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading. It was run by a five-person committee of managing directors […]

In 2013 the genetic testing firm 23andMe received a cease-and-desist letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration forbidding it from selling its...

One corporate drama playing out in the news is the fate of Saab — a now-orphan division of General Motors that appears will narrowly escape extinction by last-minute buyer Spyker. For owners, employees, dealers, and suppliers of Saab, the potential death of such an iconic brand was probably hard to fathom. After all, the Swedish […]

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One of my favorite truisms is that change is always a threat when done to me, but it is an opportunity when done by me. Many people hate change because it is inflicted on them; someone else is making them do it. Or because circumstances are totally out of their control. (As a bumper sticker […]

“A well-designed product is one you fall in love with.”

As commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Lee P. Brown faces two enormous challenges. The first is crime. In 1989 in New York City, 712,419 crimes were reported, including 1,905 murders, 93,377 robberies, and 3,254 rapes. As Brown is quick to point out, the situation has grown so severe that people in cities […]

Work with these six building blocks.

You think life is tough? Imagine you were Jacques Rogge. Imagine you were president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and had to rest your head last night fearing the “Journey of Harmony” was going to explode yet again, this time on the streets of San Francisco. The Journey of Harmony is the moniker that […]

The results of the HBR World Leadership Survey found that change is indeed everywhere--regardless of country, culture, or corporation. But the idea of...

This article relates how the HR team at Juniper Networks answered top management's call for a renewed focus on values and culture as a differentiator....