Making Culture Change Stick

From the latest Harvard Business Review, Booz & Co.provides a free PDF here.  Worth the read and reinforces the many ways we look at the power of culture in our Stanford Advanced Project Management (SAPM) program.  Our next class coming in September at Stanford University in Palo Alto.  Register here.

Harvard Business Review: Cultural Change That Sticks by Jon Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley When properly harnessed, an organization's culture can be a true differentiator that no competitor can duplicate. However, as pressures on companies build, leaders often become frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of culture evolution. In the rush to implement new strategies and make performance improvements, the legacy culture—employees' ingrained ways of doing things—can seem like the greatest barrier to change. Unfortunately, most well-intended efforts to "change the culture" fizzle out, fail, or backfire. Here's the good news: There is an alternative. Drawing on recent research and real examples, the article's authors present a new approach that leverages what is strongest in an organization's existing culture, providing a practical road map for real, substantive evolution in employees' ways of behaving by focusing on a few critical shifts. This approach has been tested and proven in client engagements across a range of regions and industries.