I’ve never been great at sticking to a plan for a long period of time. As I look to the future, I get distracted by infinite possibilities—and as I live day to day, I get distracted by media, notifications, infinite calls from the digitally connected.
Read MoreAt an event last week for the Executives’ Club of Chicago, I was asked a great question, along the lines of this famous Jeff Bezos quote: I talk a lot about change, but what do I think doesn’t change?
The book is about the mechanics of transformation, and ultimately, I believe many of those principles are timeless.
Read MoreOne of the reasons my partners and I built 18 Coffees to be focused on strategy, change management, and organizational development was that we knew we were in a unique moment in business history, one in which our basic assumptions about what it means to be a business were about to be questioned.
Read MoreIs there a better way to signal importance to a business than appointing a C-Suite head of something? Maybe not.
Recent ideas about appointing chief ESG officers gave me flashbacks to conversations ten years ago about the need for chief digital officers — and reminded me of recent appointments to chief remote officers.
Read MoreShared cultural language can be a boon to movements for change—and a barrier to seeing that change happen.
Bumperstickers and banners establish shared credentials, show us who we can trust, tell us who’s on the inside of the movement. But they’re also off-putting to those who don’t share that language, and can antagonize those whom we need to make the change happen.
Read MoreThere’s a classic thought experiment in change management called a burning platform.
From a 1993 book by Daryl R. Conner called “Managing at the Speed of Change”, it describes a situation in which maintaining the status quo is so costly, so detrimental to the business, that the level of resolve to change becomes a no-brainer. The metaphor Conner uses is is a literal platform on fire: you have to jump, because the status quo means certain death.
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How hard is it to turn a culture around? Harder than you think.
We like to think of organizations in terms of rational outputs: finance, marketing, manufacturing. But each work stream is made up of individuals responding to internal cultural influences. Each component of an organization is working toward an end, and sometimes changing that end mid-stream is like trying to get a river to run a different direction.
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