Acknowledgments

In this book, we strive to bring simplicity and clarity to a very complicated topic. The origin story of this book, meanwhile, is anything but straightforward. If any book could claim to have many authors, it would be The Critical Few. The methodology at its heart evolved out of real work done by real people with real clients. The projects, relationships, and experiences that inspired the story of Alex and Intrepid have spanned three firms—the original Katzenbach Partners, founded in 1999; Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), into which Katzenbach Partners integrated in 2008; and PwC, our current home after its acquisition of Strategy& in 2014. Along the way, many committed and brilliant thinkers and practitioners have placed their hands on this clay. We will do our best to name them all, and if you have been forgotten here in this document, know that we will someday remember, slap our collective foreheads, and beg for your forgiveness.

CORE PRACTITIONERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

The Strategy& Katzenbach Center at PwC has a small core team fully dedicated to running the center and a dedicated coterie of practitioners who actively “practice what we preach.” Together, this core team and global leadership team (GLT), with the addition of a few other very dedicated individuals, constitute the Katzenbach Center Community of Practice, named collectively as coauthors. Among this community of practice, we owe an especial debt to DeAnne Aguirre, who, in addition to a host of other institutional responsibilities, is the Strategy& US/Mexico leader and the global sponsor of the Katzenbach Center within PwC. We are also indebted to Tim Ryan, US chairman and senior partner at PwC, and Robert Moritz, PwC global chairman, for their ongoing support of this project and our work.

Here are a few memories of how this group came to be. From the Middle East, Per-Ola Karlsson has also served as a guiding voice to the center and played a leadership role in one of the most comprehensive multiyear culture evolution efforts we’ve had the pleasure to conduct—a project that also brought Roger Rabbat, another GLT member, into our fold. In Australia, Varya Davidson has been a tireless champion, building a local community of practice that includes Michelle Kam, Julian Ballard, and many others. From Europe, Frédéric Pirker, Diana Dimitrova, and Paolo Morley-Fletcher have been dedicated coleaders, and Paolo has been especially focused on integrating his deep passion for leadership development and coaching with this approach. Another leadership aficionado, Barry Vorster, has brought fascinating client situations from Africa into our repertoire. And in North America, the persistent efforts of Amanda Evison, Jaime Estupiñán, and Kristy Hull have lent this methodology a depth and resonance that would otherwise be absent—they are truly practitioners in every sense of the word.

For the past six years, the Katzenbach Center has run a fellows program through which talented, curious people in the first few years of their career in client service affiliate with us for a year to learn our methods. All our current and former fellows have contributed to our thinking in some way, such as AB Allam, Varun Bahatnagar, Simon Brown, Sean Buchholtz, Kevin Burke, Martin Crew, Jessica Geiger, Katie Griffith, Mike Neff, Tripp Fried, Vivian Pang, Alexander Pearlman, Hana Reznikov, Gideon Rutherford, Caroline Smit, Kirsten Verlander, Elena Weinstein, and Inshita Wij. We are also proud to note that a “critical few” then folded their careers, for a time, back into our core team and have made significant contributions to our work; we are lucky to count Kate Dugan, Alice Zhou, and Cindy Pan in this category. Other core team members include Brian Wayland, Katz’s right hand and our team’s operations center; Carolin Oelschlegel, whose move from Europe to the United States helped solidify the team’s global perspective; and Reid Carpenter, who also serves as the US leader of the Katzenbach Center and part of the global leadership team. Reid has been tireless in her advocacy and support of this project. In fact, without her selfless willingness to shoulder even more responsibility than usual, it is more than fair to say that there would be no book.

Within and across PwC, many individuals have offered us guidance and advice. We are grateful for the support and sponsorship of Paul Leinwand, Randy Browning, Deniz Caglar, Vinay Couto, Carrie Duarte, Miles Everson, Mohamed Kande, Joachim Rotering, and Carol Stubbings, as well as Bill Cobourn, Stephanie Hyde, Hilal Halaoui, Tom Puthiyamadam, Blair Sheppard, David Suarez, and John Sviokla. Special thanks to our HIA leaders who have provided an excellent home for the past several years: Kelly Barnes, Jeff Gitlin, Jae Kim, and Bob Glenn. The advice and counsel of Kanchi Bordick, Justine Brown, Daniel Garcia, Nadia Kubis, Matt Lieberman, Jennifer Myers, Martina Sangin, and Ilona Steffen have benefited us enormously.

We also have a broad global network of others who bring this work to clients and return to the center with new anecdotes, examples, and suggested changes to our methods. This group is too broad to fully articulate, but a few who have made a big contribution to our efforts are Peter Bertone, Antonia Cusamano, Henning Hagen, Matt Mani, Deniz Caglar, Matt Siegel, Matt Egol, Earl Simpkins, Carole Symonds, Kenji Mitsui, Jay Godla, Thom Bales, Patrick Maher, Igor Belokrinitsky, Sundar Subramanian, Rick Edmunds, Greg Rotz, and Surajit Sen. In addition, Murielle Tiambo, Maureen Trantham, Augusto Giacomman, Aaron Newman, and Sarah Nathan have all served as comrades in the field.

This book would not exist without the inspiration of Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief for PwC Global and its magazine strategy+business, who has shepherded us along from early days through our well-advised introduction to Berrett-Koehler. Strategy+business editors Dan Gross and Michelle Gerdes also provided guidance to the Katzenbach Center that indirectly benefited this book. Huge thanks also to the many PwC internal marketing and editorial partners who guided and supported us along the way: Susan Brown, Madeleine Buck, Mao-Lin Shen, Shannon King, L. Parker Barnum, Mike Manning, Jeffery McMillan, Dee Hildy, Molly Lang, Siobhan Ford, Jaime Dirr, Elizabeth Barrett, Ann-Denise Grech, Bevan Ruland, and Natasha Andre. Other writing and proofreading assistance that helped keep this project on track came from Michael Walker, who organized the material into our original outline; Faith Florer, who produced a first draft; and Victoria Beliveau, who copy-edited the final draft.

OTHER KEY CONTRIBUTORS

Others outside our firm have guided our thinking with real, deep insight. We continue to share ideas with former Katzenbach Partners colleagues, such as Niko Canner, Zia Khan, Shanti Nayak, John Rolander, Kerry Sulkcowicz, and Maggie van de Griend. An introduction to Charles Duhigg was serendipitous, as his “key-stone behaviors” idea has proved so resonant with our own approach. Former Katzenbach Partners colleague Amy Gallo, now a writer and editor, has provided wise and generous counsel. We are all grateful to Chad Gomes, who has played a crucial contributor role by sharing many useful anecdotes and pearls of wisdom from his fieldwork on this topic and has separately been a friend and collaborator with each one of us. Our editors at Berrett-Koehler, Neil Maillet, Michael Crowley, and Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, have stunned us with their warmth and encouragement.

Over the years since the conversations about this book began, families—ours and those of our closest core team and collaborators—have supported us along the way. They have also evolved, as all institutions do: expanding, contracting, and taking new shapes. On the topic of expansion, our core Katzenbach Center team has proved particularly adept in the production of progeny, and we had fun naming the characters in the narrative after these much-adored children. Will the real Avery, Calvin, Callen, Casimir, Elin, Florence, Jane, Ross, Sebastian, and Theodore—all born since this project began—please take a bow?