Gregory P. Shea

How does one communicate commitment? [Based on] the work systems model, it would be to build the work systems that indicate the commitment to the narratives you’re trying to have unfold inside the organization.

6 Reasons Your Strategy Isn’t Working

Nearly every organization is grappling with huge strategic challenges, often with a need to reimagine its very purpose, identity, strategy, business model, and structure. Most of these efforts to transform will fail. And, in most cases, they will miss the mark not because the new strategy is flawed, but because the organization can’t carry it out.

My experience in working and studying corporate transformations points to … [ Read more ]

Why Corporate Purpose Statements Often Miss Their Mark

Analysis of nearly 2,000 CEOs’ description of their company’s purpose reveals that most omit a critical detail: why their company is in business.

Jeanne Liedtka

One longstanding and popular theory of how change occurs, attributed to Richard Beckhard […] argues that behavioral alterations are a function of four factors: the dissatisfaction with the status quo, the clarity and resonance of the new future, and the existence of a pathway to get there, all balanced against any perceived loss associated with making the change.

Bill Schaninger

Historically, we’ve been disproportionately focused on the value of the cascade, the leader, change leaders. They’re still all very important. But, increasingly, as we are a workforce comprised of a generation that has a lot of their actions that are digitally based, we’ve had to come to grips with the idea that influencers and opinion leaders and people in the social network, their role modeling … [ Read more ]

Gokul Rajaram

Consensus means no ownership. What’s important is not that everyone agrees, but that everyone is heard and then the right person makes a decision.

First Round Review

The art of decision-making isn’t always about capturing some elusive “best” decision — it’s about making the most of information available, garnering trust across stakeholders and executing with conviction.

Josh Levs, Amy C. Edmondson

Psychological safety has received significant attention in recent years. Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson, credited with coining the term, has defined it in these pages as “the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed — with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns — without being shut down in a gratuitous way.”

But I’ve found … [ Read more ]

Adam Pisoni

Efficiency is great if you can plan for the long-term. If you know what you’re going to do for a long period of time, you can really get into the nuts and bolts of how to do it efficiently. But because efficiency, by design, locks in roles, processes and practices, it also makes it much harder to change.

Erik Roth

We’ve done a lot of research around what really makes for a high-performance innovation team. What we’ve found is that, if you go to Silicon Valley or Berlin or Singapore or Israel and look for the entrepreneurs—individual founders—they overweight slightly on the vision and the collaborations and underweight slightly on the execution and learning. But again, it depends on the individual.

But in a corporate environment, … [ Read more ]

Adam Bryant, David Reimer

A company’s most powerful cultural signals aren’t communicated by talking points. They’re determined by who gets promoted and who receives outsized rewards. Yet compensation and bonus frameworks in most organizations are still based almost solely upon financial results. In an effort to rule out subjectivity, such plans emphasize — and often focus exclusively on — achieving numerical targets. This oversimplified focus on the what of … [ Read more ]

Five Common Communication Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

Learn how to be more effective at your next meeting or presentation.

Forces of Nature

Understanding how ecosystems grow, thrive, and regenerate can help leaders steer their organization in the future.

Adam Kahane

One challenge in working with powerful and capable actors is that they’re typically confident that they already know what’s going on and what they need to do. This makes it hard for them to see things from a different perspective. One way to help them is to give them opportunities to listen to and talk with people who have different experiences and whom they consider … [ Read more ]

William E. Schneider

All these [people] problems have to do with people separating from one another: in silos, by disengaging, by thinking they understand when they don’t. When leaders believe everybody is clear about the direction of their enterprise, but employees perform in a way that doesn’t fit that direction, leaders and employees are separated. When people blame one another for mistakes, they create separation. These separations, or … [ Read more ]

William E. Schneider

Culture means how we hire, structure, deploy, compensate, and develop our employees to deliver on our customer promise. It establishes and underpins a company’s: structure, membership criteria, conditions for judging effective performance, communication patterns, expectations and priorities, the nature of reward and compensation, the nature and use of power, decision-making practices, and teaming practices (among others). It is about our community of employees. It is … [ Read more ]