article thumbnail

Your Consulting Niche vs Jack-of-All-Trades Myth

Successful Independent Consulting

Let’s look at some examples. Here are some excerpts from their résumés and profiles: PROFESSIONAL SUMMARIES Organizational change expert with 16 years of experience in large-scale technology implementations for the Fortune 500. Translation: change management for IT projects. Translation: turnaround expert.

article thumbnail

Small Steps or Big Steps: What’s the Right Way to Begin Improvement?

Markovitz Consulting

He describes his “shock and awe” approach (my terminology) in his excellent book The Lean Turnaround , where he takes the company through several week-long kaizen events. He’s found that it’s easier to get patients to change unhealthy parts of their lifestyle through small, incremental modifications than through wholesale changes.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Leaders Who Get Change Right Know How to Listen

Harvard Business

What she learned informed her strategy for the turnaround, which she then communicated through a series of town halls, roundtables, and memos. ” And she restored the company’s profitability — the turnaround was a success. Anderson provides another good example. Hope rekindled. Energy returned.”

article thumbnail

How Agile Teams Can Help Turnarounds Succeed

Harvard Business

It is most definitely not for big, old-line companies that are facing an existential crisis and require a full-scale turnaround. None of these conditions exists in extreme events such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, major military battles — or large-scale business turnarounds. It’s for techies.

article thumbnail

How Volvo Reinvented Itself Through Hiring

Harvard Business

But when some CEOs in this position look at the people they employ, they discover a problem: a swath of their existing team doesn’t have the necessary skills or metabolism for change to meet the new challenges. Volvo’s turnaround over the last decade offers a great example.

Talent 28
article thumbnail

Organizations Can’t Change If Leaders Can’t Change with Them

Harvard Business

The pattern is clear, and diligent leaders often devote countless resources to planning out the perfect change management initiative. One client of ours realized early in the process of leading the turnaround of a flailing division that her impatience was making performance worse and weakening confidence in the future.

article thumbnail

Your Organization Wastes Time. Here’s How to Fix It.

Harvard Business

For example, large biopharma companies compete in many categories and tend to accumulate an array of follower positions. While the former approach is friendlier from a change management perspective, we usually find that it leads to only incremental change. Consider the remarkable turnaround at Ford.

How To 48