Change management

Losing talent is your number one risk.

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.

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 […]

Everyone applauds innovation. At least, they love it in retrospect, after it has worked. Before that, it's just somebody's wild idea that competes with...

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Encourage your team to share stories of how they persevered through a crisis so you can apply these lessons to the next challenge.

(Editor’s note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June 2010, hosted by HBS’s Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook.) I’m convinced that — with new […]

Children in the Northern Hemisphere are headed back to school this time of year. The great majority of them will go back to the traditional classroom,...

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 […]

What do IBM, Texas Instruments, Owens Corning, and Duke Power have in common? They’re all redesigning their organizations around their core processes—and reaping enormous benefits as a result.

Over the last decade a new technology has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to evaluate. While many aspects of this technology are uncertain, it seems clear that it will move into the managerial scene rapidly, with definite and far-reaching impact on managerial organization. In […]

New leaders must prove themselves quickly, but the quest for rapid results is inherently dangerous. Where are the traps, and how can managers avoid them?

I spoke recently with Walter Kiechel about his new book, The Lords of Strategy, which describes the rise of the large strategy consulting firms - BCG,...

With his talk of “the shrinking half-life of ideas,” “virtual team networks,” and “breakthrough thinking,” John Browne sounds more like a Silicon Valley CEO than the head of the giant British Petroleum Company. Then again, BP—with its flat organization, entrepreneurial business units, web of alliances, and surging profits—is starting to look and act like a […]

At last, we’re in the final week of what has seemed like an endless presidential campaign. Other than the bizarre rise of “Joe the Plumber,” perhaps the most-invoked image by both candidates is the “discussion around the dinner table.” And for good reason. It is around the dinner table–after the dishes have been cleared, after […]

What could be harder than turning around a seemingly wildly successful company by imposing a centralized framework on a heretofore radically decentralized,...

Continuous improvement at Toyota Motor Company is now a business legend. For three decades, Toyota enlisted its employees in a relentless drive to find faster, more efficient methods to develop and make low-cost, defect-free cars. The results were stupendous. Toyota became the benchmark in the automobile industry for quality and low cost. The same, however, […]