In previous blog posts we addressed the importance of creating a sense of urgency for your organizational change initiative (e.g., Use Heart and Mind Appeal to Create a Sense of Urgency). Establishing a proper sense of urgency for change is often a skipped step or it is assumed that the sense of urgency is already […]
Leadership development initiatives are often dismissed as being too disruptive, too expensive, or too time consuming – simply not a priority. I’ll share a vignette and new research that may convince you otherwise. Recently, I was working with a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company. Our shared objective was to build internal change capability in response to […]
In our last article, we talked about the importance of the informal elements of the organization. Many valuable social networks exist within the informal part of the organization. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a diagnostic methodology for uncovering and analyzing these networks and relationship patterns. When applied to business, SNA can be a powerful tool […]
Most change leaders I work with have a complicated relationship with office politics. They know their initiatives live or die in it. They also know they are supposed to be above it. So they try to win on the merits: send the well-reasoned memo, schedule the all-hands, walk the deck through three layers of review, […]
Never underestimate the importance of buy-in to the success of your strategic initiative or business transformation. Buy-in is so critical for creating a sense of urgency and gaining stakeholder alignment that John Kotter wrote a book about it: Buy-In: Saving Your Good Ideas From Getting Shot Down(2010, Harvard Business Press). All business initiatives begin as […]
“Can we make that information available on an iPad?” It is one of the most common requests we hear from executives in the systems transformation space – no doubt a confluence of technology and regulations. Call it the “cool factor” or simply a clever way for executives to avoid getting their fingers dirty in corporate […]
Merging two established organizations is not merely the combination of two operations under one management authority. Successful integration combines, replaces, and transforms diverse processes, systems and organizational structures. Done well, the resulting entity will be distinctly different and ideally much better than the original operations – this is the “synergy” that is goal of most […]
In his new book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (July 2011), Richard Rumelt highlights the hallmarks of bad business strategy and recommends a framework for developing good strategy. We piggyback on his concepts to highlight the role that structured change plays in implementing good strategies. Bad Strategy According to […]
Jesse Jacoby
