In a recent webinar that Patty McManus and I led — "Three Strategies to Succeed at Change (and what to do if it goes sideways)" — many change leaders in the audience expressed concern about sponsorship. The short headline: "Lack of sponsorship can wreck a change effort."

Most major change initiatives in business fail to achieve their desired results. This is a shocking fact, when you consider how much is at stake when you undertake change — whether it's a company reorganization, new technology implementation, new products/services, you name it. And even the most successful initiatives are often painful and time-consuming to implement.

Restructuring an organization may be commonplace, but it isn't easy. I'm currently working with three companies that are either being acquired, or spinning off divisions to create new publicly traded companies — and I've been a leader during a restructuring (when PepsiCo divested itself of Pizza Hut). There are rumors that PepsiCo may be at it again; financial blogs are buzzing about the possible spin off Frito Lay.

December 15th we enjoyed a dynamic conversation with Christine Arena, author of the High Purpose Company and CEO of SparkUp, a new technology for engaging stakeholders.  Christine explored what it means to be living in the "Participation Economy," how leading edge companies are developing non-traditional relationships with their consumers and employees, and what questions leaders should be asking themselves and their companie

Over the years, a handy term has come into use in organizational literature and conversation, borrowed from psychotherapy: resistance to change. This phrase reminds me of some of the other psychological terms we use all the time to label troubling behavior in others: “passive aggressive”, “ADHD”, “manic depressive”.

With a miserable 75% failure rate, mergers and acquisitions seem risky at best. Yet in today's economic climate, they are more in vogue than ever. How can you increase your odds for M&A success? In this ten-minute podcast, Jamie Harris discusses common factors that cause mergers and acquisitions to stumble (Hint: it's the people part). Then, you'll learn three key strategies for M&A success.

Use the play button to listen now. To download the podcast, please right-click and save the mp3 for listening on your mp3 player or on your computer, anytime.

Change brings with it anxiety, excitement, and a desire to know and affect our future. Yet when it comes to predicting how we will feel when the change is accomplished, we are not very accurate. Sometimes we believe we will experience pure joy, and other times, extreme conflict — what makes us think we can know this feeling ahead of time? Let's look at an example of change in the workplace that illustrates what I mean.

Download Patty McManus' ebook, "The Little Book of Big Change."

As pharmaceutical companies have grown and globalized, they have faced increased challenges to sustain innovation with global teams and to be nimble and stay ahead of ever more diverse competitors. They are constantly challenged to accelerate the process of bringing new drugs to the market that are medically effective and differentiated from the competition. While trying to meet these challenges, they must continuously manage the very difficult balance between market driven "need for speed" and the absolute need for scientific rigor and safety.

It’s no secret there has been a major shift in Human Resources in the last decade. HR leaders are grappling with deep cultural, functional, and operational changes – commonly referred to as "HR transformation." As transactional HR operations are made more efficient through process streamlining, technology, and outsourcing, HR is linking itself to corporate strategy, and discovering new ways to create business value.