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Middle Managers.  That’s the most often given answer to the question, “Who most resists change in your organization?” It would be easy to go along with the crowd and turn middle managers into the villains of our change story, but something doesn’t seem right.  It seems too easy to scapegoat them, individually and collectively.  Instead, […]

Conventionally powered change runs on the force of driving people.  It takes years, has a high failure rate (sources vary in the actual %, but individual experience can attest that it fails more often than we’d like) and leaves you depleted of funds, morale, and good will. Unconventional change runs on driving change. It takes weeks

As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing nears, my thoughts have been drifting past the moon, to Mars. In 1962, when President Kennedy challenged the United States to go to the moon he said, We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in

Mother Teresa told a story of a man in Melbourne she visited who had been, it seemed, forgotten by the world and himself.  She asked to clean his room for him because she saw it was in a terrible state.  He reluctantly agreed.  When she cleaned she found an old, beautiful, unlit lamp covered in

In a Harvard Business Review blog post, Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan introduce us to the concept of a fast zebra: someone who, “can quickly absorb information, adapt to new challenges, and get people aligned in the right direction… They are the people who can skirt around or blast through the kind of gridlock found