As a business transformation consultant my advice is to organizations as a whole on how to implement, and become resilient to, change. And having done this for many years, I observed that some people deal with change much better than others. Of course this should not be a surprise to anyone, but the roots of […]

Employee retention is a key component of a Merger and Acquisition (M&A) integration. And employee retention can be a company’s biggest hurdle to realize the expected return on investment (ROI). The main reason for this is that financial models don’t fully capture the full costs of M&A integration. This became very clear to me early […]

Accountable, responsible. Poteighto, potaato. Interchangeable, right? Wrong. There is a huge difference. Often people do use the terms “accountability” and “responsibility” interchangeably, and frequently it does not create issues. However, when you are trying to transform your organization, or revitalize your company, the difference becomes very important. So, what is the difference? Delegation Makes All […]

How valuable is aligning leaders for a business transformation? How about $80 million worth? We were working on a process transformation program with a North American executive team of a global company. There were seven executives, each incredibly competent, but very independent. This created silos that made collaboration and alignment tough. We used our Organizational […]

Prioritizing is about as exciting a subject as dealing with issues and risks (see previous blog). Be honest: just reading that previous sentence, and the words “prioritizing”, “issues”, and “risks”, a glaze is starting to form in front of your eyes, right? But hang on, this next sentence is much more interesting. She needed something […]

Aligning key decision makers can be tough. Senior leaders operate in an environment where individual competence is highly valued and rewarded. Add to this the competitive nature present in most, if not all, executives, plus the healthy ego required to operate at this level. Mix it all up, and it leads to a challenge to […]

As usual, she parked her car on the side of the driveway closest to the house entrance. And as usual, she came home late, after dark. Nobody would be at home. As usual, alone, in her house. She walked up the steps to her designer steel framed door, but as usual she was too worn […]

“You have to start with a vision, blah, blah, blah…” No kidding. And how often have we heard that? As you’ll likely agree, it’s not having a vision, but it’s being able to articulate the vision, that makes a difference. Furthermore, being able to articulate it in a way so that people can see it […]

My friend Lisa was telling me the other day about how she had to deliver a PowerPoint presentation, on her marketing strategy, to a group of sales executives. Her concern was how to keep them engaged, paying attention. The slides would contain some analytical data that could come across as a bit dry to this […]

Overcoming adversity was not something General Electric, Walt Disney, Netflix and Airbnb had to do when they were starting up: True or false? As I wrote in my previous blog, when we think of well known, global market leaders such as these, we tend to assume they started up during ideal economic times. Somehow there […]