About Leading Strategic Change

Today, virtually every organization faces massive change. Unfortunately, change is extraordinarily difficult and most attempts to initiate and implement change fail. In Leading Strategic Change, J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen identify the core problem: changing the "mental maps" inside each of our heads.

Just as actual maps guide people's footsteps, mental maps guide daily behavior. Successful strategic change for the organization is all about changing individuals first, because they are the organization.

To change organizations, you must break through the brain barrier. Perhaps Yogi Berra described it best when he claimed, "Ninety percent of baseball is mental. The other fifty percent is physical." So, too, in business.

Leading Strategic Change systematically shows how to make the most important change of all: "redrawing" individuals' mental maps with new destinations and paths. Black and Gregersen identify the brain barriers that keep strategic change from success: failure to see, failure to move, and failure to finish.

Overcoming the failure to see

Why organizations miss obvious market transformations—and what to do about it

Breaking through the failure to move

Why people fail to change—even when they see the need—and how to break through this barrier

Conquering the failure to finish

Why change "stalls out" and how to maintain the momentum

Anticipating change

Creating the capability to anticipate change, move when needed, and finish in the future without "being told"