Change Management

Stay one step ahead of change

January 3, 2013
One of the best reasons to do strategic planning is to help your team anticipate change. To lead your colleagues to think strategically, take the following steps.

Run your thinking through a process

November 8, 2012
It’s tempting to face the unfamiliar head-on, but you have to think it through. Here’s how.

5 stages of change

October 29, 2012
One of the most tested models for changing behavior assumes five stages of change: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. The idea is not to hurry or skip stages. You need each stage to move to the next one.

Help your troops manage risk & change

August 5, 2012
To help your troops manage risk and change, help them access the information that will allow them to react well—and without fear—just like the Royal Marines, who have been trained to convert uncertainty (and fear) into well-defined risks.

Burn the houses, save the nails

July 19, 2012

Culture matters. It affects both performance and outcomes. A quick review of early American ­history shows a parallel between building a house then and building an organization now.

Ford’s better idea?

July 10, 2012

Ford Motor, led by CEO Alan Mulally, is fighting for American manufacturing with a single strategy: simplify. This One Ford strategy means selling the same model, built the same way, in all markets.

A faster cycle of change

June 28, 2012

Learning faster than your competitors can lead to a competitive advantage. So can changing faster than your competitors. What you learn has to be translated into change. And that suggests a continuous feedback loop of perceiving and change.

Always have Plan B

March 26, 2012
Having a Plan B is what saved Bill Gantz’s pharmaceutical giant Baxter Corp. With Plan B in his back pocket, Gantz saved his company and sold it to Chiron Novartis for $720 million.

4 ways to make complex choices easier

March 23, 2012
Sheena ­Iyengar and her fellow researchers at Columbia Business School set up a tasting booth near the entrance of a store, putting out either six choices of jam or 24 choices. They found that people were six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had only six choices versus 24. What are the implications for business leaders?

Finding the opportunities in bad news

December 8, 2011
If people don’t feel safe bringing bad news to you, then they’ll never want to bring anything but a rosy outlook. “So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news,” says Joseph Jimenez, who took over as a division president for an underperforming company.