Enabling organizations to align strategy and execution to capture new opportunities or execute better against existing priorities.
The process provides a template for change leadership that anchors transformation on the required business impact by providing:
Shared diagnosis: an analysis of the root causes affecting the organization’s ability to successfully execute its strategy, shared across the key layers of management.
Agreed agenda for action: specific actions to address and resolve the issues identified in the shared diagnosis, forming a common agenda to galvanize people into action.
Common language: a way of talking that breaks down barriers and makes it possible for leaders to discuss and collaborate to resolve issues in the business.
Working with senior leaders and their teams to build capability and lead organizations through rapid change and growth.
The senior team’s core challenge is to manage a series of trade-offs that have no right answers: short –term performance versus long-term growth; shareholder interests versus those of other stakeholders; breakthrough innovation versus established product portfolios.
Through research conducted at the Harvard Business School, we have identified the practices of teams that manage these trade-offs successfully; and the pathologies of those that do not. Our work with CEOs and their teams applies this research, along with our skills in dialogue and coaching, to help teams transform their performance.
Leveraging our deep research and tools we advise companies on building ambidextrous organizations to nurture growth businesses.
Great ideas are important for business growth. However, a much greater challenge is turning those ideas into successful new businesses. Managing a growth business with the same logic as a mature one can lead to real problems. We advise clients adopting the ‘ambidextrous organization’ approach to enable organic growth.
Using our advanced research into the ‘ambidextrous organization’ our team works with clients on issues such as fostering cross line of business innovation, understanding social networks and building ‘ambidextrous’ organization structures.
We work with organizations to make how employees behave a powerful source of competitive advantage.
Southwest Airlines, Cisco, and others are renowned for achieving an extraordinary source of competitive advantage through the way their employees behave. This advantage is not random. They have deliberately constructed a culture that aligns people and strategy in a powerful combination.
We have a practical approach to culture that executives recognize, understand and use to build better organizations. Our clients use our methods to assess culture and tightly align it to the requirements of their strategy.
Creating leaders with the capacity to lead innovation and change; inspiring others to extraordinary results.
Our leadership development programs are based on the highly-successful Harvard Business School/Stanford University GSB executive education program, ‘Leading Change and Organizational Renewal.’ This work connects organization-wide challenges to the individual work and responsibility of leaders. It is ideally designed to support large-scale transformation goals where leaders at multiple levels are required to become more active advocates of change.
Typical content includes:
Challenge of change: how and why organizations work harder to stay the same in the face of the most severe external threats.
Organizational diagnosis: a practical method to identify what needs to be done to transform business performance.
Leading change: how leaders win support and engagement from others in the organization; overcome resistance; build support and momentum; and, sustain change over multiple phases.
Culture diagnosis and change: we offer practical definition and understanding of how to shape and use culture to a leader’s advantage.
Real-work learning: we base our learning on ‘real-work’ challenges that participants bring to solve on before, during and after the session.
Applying Change Logic’s Change Rubric to guide implementation by individuals and teams.
Change means breaking old habits and learning new ones. We believe a disciplined approach to day-to-day implementation can reinforce commitments made by leaders and team members so enabling new habits to form.
New behaviors are particularly tough habits to learn. We encourage leaders to make commitments about their behavior that are specific, measurable, and shared publically – at least within the team. These leaders are significantly more likely to do what they commit to than those that talk in vague generalities.
We help leaders create management systems that reinforce accountability for action, track metrics and apply adequate resources to sustain a change effort through instability and uncertainty. Together, these disciplines help organizations to break old habits and allow the change to take hold.
Working with individual leaders to support them in making the behavior shifts needed to reach their potential.
Our coaching practices are based on Dr. Peter Finkelstein's 30 years of experience and research in the area of human behavior. In an age when coaching has become a fashion, Peter’s training as a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist with 15 years’ coaching CEOs is distinctive.
The approach focuses on a few high-quality interactions. This allows a deep process which leads to progress on substantive issues. Each cycle of work lasts no more than 90 days and is focused on clear behavioral objectives.