Change management

When companies cause emotional pain through nasty bosses, layoffs, and change, a certain breed of “healing” manager steps in to keep the gears moving. They are toxic handlers—unsung corporate heroes who save the day, but often pay a high price.

Imagine yourself solving an arithmetic problem with the top managers of a leading Japanese automobile company. As a group, Japanese producers already export 2.3 million passenger vehicles a year to the United States. They are also building capacity for an additional 2.5 million vehicles in North America. You remind your friends across the table that […]

Connecting a project to core principles - and explaining how it will benefit stakeholders - can spark the motivation required for success.

At least, the successful ones are.

As the company cut costs, its ability to innovate suffered.

From restaurants to lead paint, data is making government more efficient.

What do leading change and doing physics have in common? Good question. I have no idea. I do know that for my new book, Buy-In I have a co-author, Lorne...

Thousands of companies every year acquire other companies, or are acquired themselves. This event is usually painful and messy--and statistics show, it...

“You can’t be serious!” Mike Trail, the president and fourth-generation owner of Trail Manufacturing, stared at five older men standing uncomfortably in his small office. “I’m afraid we are, Mike.” Sandy Mulder, the most senior of the five, was polite but firm. “We won’t switch over to the new equipment. We want to continue to […]

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,...

Newcomers may have the will, but industry insiders have the way.

Many leaders taking on new roles try to prove themselves early on by going after quick wins - fresh, visible contributions to the business. But in the...

A team at McKinsey tracked the performance of 80 banks over four years to identify exactly how their transformation efforts paid off - and how others...

The story of Royal Bank of Canada.

How B2B giant Thomson Corporation reinvented itself by embracing a P&G mind-set.

You and your team have been wrestling with the problem of increasing efficiencies without a big budget to make it happen. You've been authorized to look...

Blame it on advances in technology and communication, globalization, the rise of the middle class, population explosion, global warming, or mismanagement of massive financial institutions. Whatever the cause, for a lot of us, things are very different than they were six months ago, not to mention ten years ago. We have been catapulted toward a […]

Results from a study of 1,350 companies.

Andrew Jordan sat at his desk, absentmindedly watching a barge chug slowly upstream on the Thames. The dinner meeting he had scheduled with a select group of senior managers at Universal Products Company, Ltd. would begin in an hour. For three years, it had seemed enough to focus on the business problems of UPC’s Connectors […]

George Stanton thought a new job would solve his problems. But now he’s facing similar workplace conflicts.