Jeanie Duck

When an organization embarks on a change of any magnitude, its leaders tend to think that they are facing a series of operational tasks that will, if executed successfully, result in a new state of being. They don’t realize that they will also have to face an onslaught of emotions and human dynamics. I have come to understand that emotions truly are data and have … [ Read more ]

Lessons From My Three Decades With The Change Monster

Jeanie Duck is known for mixing Southern charm and sass with business insight and acumen. For the past three decades, she has used that mixture to good advantage in helping companies initiate change and make it stick. Duck recently retired as a senior partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group, but not without leaving behind ten lessons from her long career.

Let Middle Managers Manage

After months of drafting vision statements and rearranging organizational boxes, many companies have bogged down in the muddy terrain that separates theory from implementation, change on paper from change in reality. What went wrong? In their eagerness to unlock the creativity of the worker, some companies neglected a most valuable and necessary player in any change process – the middle manager.

Editor’s Note: written in early … [ Read more ]

The Seduction of Reductionist Thinking

There’s hardly a company today that isn’t grappling with the difficulty of change. The problem isn’t so much figuring out what to change – everyone knows that business has to become faster and better – it’s how to get from here to there. Unfortunately, the approach to managing change that seems most reasonable and least arduous also turns out to be wrong. The problem is … [ Read more ]