Five Truths (and One Lie) About Corporate Transformation

In an increasingly turbulent world, the need for and the challenges of corporate change remain remarkably persistent. Empirical insights reveal how change leaders can beat the odds. We highlight five truths about corporate transformation—and refute one lie that executives like to tell themselves.

How to Actually Execute Change at a Company

The author analyzed project teams across 257 firms to identify why only 60% of planned value is typically realized in change initiatives, focusing on four key factors: effective initial communication (“ACE the Memo”), ensuring resource accessibility and autonomy (“Master the Means”), employing mechanisms to align actions with goals (“Amplify with Mechanisms”), and account for the needs of each implementation stage (“Measure to Account”).

How to Create a Transformation That Lasts

Transformations are here to stay—and they will always be difficult. Success comes down to a few key things. Manage your processes rigorously, and institute strong governance. Use a stage-gate methodology to maximize the value of your initiatives, and use software and data to keep those initiatives on track. Put a TO at the center. Perhaps most important, set the bar high—and then look for the … [ Read more ]

How bold is your business transformation? A new way to measure progress

Organizations that successfully pull off a high-performing transformation don’t choose between either holistic performance or business reinvention. They pursue both.

How Change Aversion Can Derail a Transformation

Achieving change is difficult. Organizations spend more than $10 billion annually on change transformations, but more than 50% of efforts fail to meet objectives. To better understand why, despite our best intentions, change efforts tend to fail, we looked to the literature—and found that “loss aversion” presents a helpful point of reference.

To better understand this phenomenon, we surveyed more than 200 people across the US … [ Read more ]

Familiar Yet Fatal: 10 Common Pathologies of Failed Change Efforts

75% percent of ambitious change programs fail to capture long-term value. Despite these grim odds, globally, organizations spend $10 B annually on change management efforts. That is understandable in some ways — in our evolve-or-perish environment, organizations cannot afford to stay still. But more fundamentally, it suggests that organizations need to rethink the “tried and tested” approaches to change management. Our research suggests that change … [ Read more ]

How the Best Set Up Their Program Journey

Only a third of corporate transformations succeed, but two early decisions can help you buck the odds. A new BCG series, “Transformation Revisited,” shows how.

Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short

Our latest transformations research confirms that success remains elusive and reliant on a holistic approach. Yet some actions are especially predictive of realizing the financial benefits at stake.

Strategies of Change

Instead of defaulting to the standard change management methods, leaders should adopt strategies of change that respond appropriately to the specific characteristics of their change context.

How many people are really needed in a transformation?

Deciding how many employees to involve in an organization’s transformation shouldn’t be a guessing game. New research can help.

The First 100 Days Make or Break Your Transformation

What are the most important issues to focus on when you embark on a business transformation? Ask ten executives, and you’ll get ten different answers. In the critical first 100 days, there are many considerations to weigh, decisions to make, and actions to take—and their timing and sequence can be as instrumental to success as the moves themselves.

So how do you ensure the company is … [ Read more ]

A Better Way to Lead Large-Scale Change

In Beyond Performance 2.0 (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger draw on their 40-plus years of combined experience, and on the most comprehensive research effort of its kind, to provide a practical and proven “how to” guide for leading successful large-scale change. This article, drawn from the book’s opening chapter, provides an overview of this approach and explains … [ Read more ]

Changing the Change Rules at Google

There is no single way that Google manages internal change, like a reorganization. But we’ve been piloting a new approach that has been used in different parts of the company, impacting thousands of Googlers. After piloting and iterating on our work, we came up with a four-step approach to business-driven organizational change we call “ChangeRules.” Four analytical questions drive this approach: Why? What? Who? How? … [ Read more ]

The 6 Personalities of Change Rejection

Is it any wonder that so many of us are scared of change?

Before we completed our research into this phenomenon, I often wondered how rational and intelligent people could make such sloppy and irrational arguments against obvious improvements.

Today, I have a much better idea why people resist the inevitable. If you’re unsure why those around you are having such a difficult time embracing a new … [ Read more ]

Research: To Get People to Embrace Change, Emphasize What Will Stay the Same

In overcoming resistance to change and building support for change, leaders need to communicate an appealing vision of change in combination with a vision of continuity. Unless they are able to ensure people that what defines the organization’s identity — “what makes us who we are” — will be preserved despite the changes, leaders may have to brace themselves for a wave of resistance.

How to Find and Engage Authentic Informal Leaders

Authentic informal leaders (AILs) are not people in your organization who have been endowed with formal authority by title or by memo. Rather, they possess and exhibit certain leadership strengths such as the ability to do something important well and showing others how to do it (exemplars), or they demonstrate the skill of connecting people across the organization (networkers). Some AILs influence behavior by being … [ Read more ]

Strategic Change Is All in the Timing

Large organizations have many different heartbeats, and change managers need to listen to them all.

Change Management Is Becoming Increasingly Data-Driven. Companies Aren’t Ready

Data science is becoming a reality for change management, and although it may not have arrived yet, it is time for organizations to get ready. The companies best positioned to change in the next decade will be the ones that set themselves up well now, by collecting the right kind of data and investing in their analytics capacity.

The key to building predictive models is knowing … [ Read more ]

Keeping Transformations on Target

Analysis of high-stakes transformations reveals a few pragmatic lessons that increase the odds of meeting the organization’s objectives.