Leading Strategic Change: Breaking Through the Brain Barrier

Of organizations that seek strategic change, 70% fail. In Leading Strategic Change,now in paperback, leading consultants J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen examine the core problem: organizations fail to change because individuals fail to change. Black and Gregersen identify the "brain barriers" that keep strategic change from success--failure to see, failure to move, and failure to finish--and offer a start-to-finish strategy for helping others change how they view their goals and the steps they must take to achieve them. This book systematically shows you how to implement the single change that makes all the others possible: redirecting individuals' ideas and expectations to be aligned with the new direction of the company.

J. STEWART BLACK, Ph.D. is a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan. An internationally recognized scholar on change and transformation, he is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world and company functions and is regularly sought out to help leading companies globally with strategic change initiatives and the development of their senior leaders and high-potential managers. Dr. Black has served on the faculties of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of eight other books and nearly 100 articles and case studies that have been widely used in both university classrooms and corporate boardrooms.

HAL B. GREGERSEN, Ph.D. is the Donald L. Staheli Professor of Global Leadership in the Marriott School at Brigham Young University. Previously he taught at Dartmouth College, Pennsylvania State University, and the Turku School of Economics in Finland as a Fulbright Fellow. Dr. Gregersen is a frequent keynote conference speaker on leading strategic change and an executive education contributor in companies (Cemex, IBM, Intel, LG Group, Lockheed Martin, Marriott, and Nokia) and universities (University of Michigan, Helsinki School of Economics, Tufts University, Thunderbird, and University of Western Ontario) around the world. As author of seven books and over 60 articles in publications like the Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review, Dr. Gregersen is a globally respected scholar on how firms find and build executive leaders capable of conceiving and achieving worldwide change. He has appeared on programs such as CNNfn. His cutting-edge research on global leadership has been cited in numerous publications such as BusinessWeek, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal.

Black and Gregersen are co-authors of "Global Explorers: The Next Generation of Leaders," "So You're Going Overseas: A Handbook for Personal and Professional Success" and "So You're Coming Home."

Foreword by Clayton M. Christensen, author of "The Innovator's Dilemma," the New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller.