Results Delivery: Managing the Highs and Lows of Change

Some business leaders retain their common sense and wisdom, even in the face of radical change. They recognize that mood swings occur in predictable patterns. They anticipate what’s coming, and they help others cope by counteracting the emotional fluctuations and mitigating the accompanying risks. Successfully managing the biases and effectively guiding change in this way create significant value.

Changing Change Management: A Blueprint That Takes Hold

Despite the dismal history of corporate-change efforts, there are ways for organizations to successfully manage change—and make sure the changes stick. BCG’s latest report shows how the Change Delta—a disciplined, systematic approach—focuses energy and resources on the change elements that matter most.

Choreographing a Full Potential Transformation

Transformation is one of those overused words in business, which can mean almost anything—from a quick-and-dirty restructuring to a full-scale corporate rescue. We define Full Potential Transformation in the most literal sense: a cross-functional effort to alter the financial, operational and strategic trajectory of the business, with a stated goal of producing game-changing results.

In our experience, identifying the need for a broad transformation and implementing … [ Read more ]

Build a Change Platform, Not a Change Program

It’s not you, it’s your company. Management Innovation eXchange founders Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini believe that continuous improvement requires the creation of change platforms, rather than change programs ordained and implemented from the top.

Editor’s Note: I found this article to be a bit empty and unconvincing, but perhaps you will disagree.

Frank Herbert

Any one response to the universe, however powerful, becomes inappropriate with time and change. Those who become utterly dependent on one means of mastery will find themselves unable to cope with the future.

Flipping the Odds for Successful Reorganization: Organization of the Future: Designed to Win

Rapid change requires companies to reorganize more frequently, more fundamentally, and faster than ever before. But the odds for failure are high. New BCG research has uncovered six critical success factors that can dramatically flip a company’s odds of reorganization success—and help it achieve reorganization’s ultimate purpose: driving competitive advantage.

Tapping the Power of Hidden Influencers

A tool social scientists use to identify sex workers and drug users can help senior executives find the people most likely to catalyze—or sabotage—organizational-change efforts.

Cultural Change That Sticks

When properly harnessed, an organization’s culture can be a true differentiator that no competitor can duplicate. However, as pressures on companies build, leaders often become frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of culture evolution. In the rush to implement new strategies and make performance improvements, the legacy culture—employees’ ingrained ways of doing things—can seem like the greatest barrier to change. Unfortunately, most well-intended efforts to … [ Read more ]

Alfred North Whitehead

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

The Critical Few: Components of a Truly Effective Culture

Forget the monolithic change management programs and focus on the elements of your culture that drive performance.

Seth Godin

Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That’s what makes them reliable. That’s what makes them competent. Competent people are quite proud of the status and success that they get out of being competent. They like being competent. They guard their competence, and they work hard to maintain it. … [ Read more ]

Change Leader, Change Thyself

Anyone who pulls the organization in new directions must look inward as well as outward.

Ricardo Semler

Being prepared to make major changes is what most executives will not do or are not prepared to do. Certainly this is true of corporate boards. Look at their makeup: twelve guys who are in other businesses and who have other lives to live. Why would they want to create havoc? So […] they’ll make cautious instead of intrepid decisions. Boards are set up to … [ Read more ]

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Change compelled by crisis is usually seen as a threat, not an opportunity.

Peter Drucker

A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.

Howard Gardner

There are three factors involved in resistances: age, emotion and public stance. First of all, the longer your neural networks have been running one way, the harder it is to rewire them. Unfortunately, that’s just a fact of life. Number two, the things that you feel very strongly about emotionally are the hardest to change your mind about. And three, particularly for people who are … [ Read more ]

Howard Gardner

I don’t believe behavior change lasts unless people’s minds change voluntarily. I’m interested in leadership that’s overt and mind-changing that’s intentional.

John Kotter, Dan Cohen

You need to address anxieties, accept anger, and demonstrate credibility in a very gut-level sense, to evoke faith in the vision.