“Flying people, not planes”: The CEO of Bombardier on building a world-class culture - McKinsey Quarterly

Pierre Beaudoin explains how a company driven by engineering goals learned to focus on customer expectations, teamwork, and continuous improvement. Canada’s Bombardier was founded in 1942 to make snowmobiles and similar equipment. Today, it makes trains and airplanes and is the world’s number-one train manufacturer and number three in civil aircraft.1 The company’s revenue and stock price have held up during the downturn. Over the past couple of years, it has significantly boosted its investments for growth, most notably an entirely new airplane design: the CSeries, a transcontinental commercial airliner with significantly lower emissions and running costs than existing planes have.

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A Formula for Managing On-Going Change - Booz and Co

Business transformation is now a continuous process most companies have not mastered. In this article from the well regarded Booz@Co strategy+business magazine, partners from Booz&Co offer a framework that can assist organisations in this vital process.

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Should Leaders Frighten or Inspire? - Harvard Business Review

Is it easier to motivate people to change by scaring them or by inspiring them? And is it more effective to marshal data points, or to craft a narrative? I'm at the Imagine Solutions conference in Naples, Florida, and change is on everyone's mind. But though we're ostensibly debating issues like health care, the environment, energy, and the economy, I keep picking up on the meta-debate about what kind of leadership these issues require. Dean Ornish, for instance, spoke Monday morning about the motivational power of focusing on the positive. He's a doctor who champions preventive medicine (he's the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute). He lambasted what he called the false choices between what is "fun" and what is healthy, and instead called on medical leaders who focus on the benefits — the fun side effects, as it were — of living a healthier life. And to convince us, he presented intense quantitative data culled from his research: tumors arrested (and by how much), heart disease reversed (and how quickly), genes expressed and unexpressed (with color-coded diagrams.) (Yes, living healthier can actually turn harmful genes "off." But I digress.)

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How Much Change Would You Settle For? from Harvard Business Review

At the Imagine Solutions conference, the watchword was change. Whether they wanted to bring down the national debt (like Niall Ferguson), reform Washington (like David Walker), halt global climate change (like Carter Roberts), or reinvent health care (like Patch Adams), everyone agreed that the world needed changing, even if they didn't quite agree on the specifics of what that change should look like. Yet it became clear as the conference progressed that the speakers also disagreed on how much change was enough. When tackling daunting problems in health care, the environment, politics, or the economy, can incremental adjustments make a real difference? Or is anything less than total transformation not even worth the effort?

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The History of the Evolution of Strategy as a Professional Service - Harvard Business Review

I spoke recently with Walter Kiechel about his new book, The Lords of Strategy, which describes the rise of the large strategy consulting firms — BCG, McKinsey, and Bain — as well as the business school professors who contributed conceptual frameworks and pragmatic insights to the strategy revolution. Kiechel, a former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, was the Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing from 1998 to 2002. HBR: Two of the big themes in the evolution of strategy thinking from the 1960s to the present particularly caught our eye. The first is the rise of frameworks that brought with them Greater Taylorism — sharp-penciled analytics that focus on costs and efficiency. The second is about helping employees to learn, innovate, and change. Why is the first set of ideas so much better understood?

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