Change Management Insights from a Fortune 500 Apparel Company’s Restructuring

Recently, consulting firm Emergent partnered with a Fortune 500 apparel company to undertake the biggest business transformation in the company’s history. Below is a mini case study that provides insights from that project. Building upon its solid performance in 2012, the company chose to implement a new global structure designed to fuel its long-term, international growth. The project…

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Does Change Have to be Painful?

A corporate leader’s job is hardly easy.  He or she must efficiently manage employees, account for outside competition, note any changes in the industry landscape and if necessary, profoundly modify the operational model a business should employ.   Ironically, most leaders shrug in defiance at such duties due to their seemingly complex nature.  However, there are…

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Don’t Forget the "Why" in Your Mission Statement

A colleague of mine, Gwen Kinsey, led a crisp, interactive presentation at a recent leadership breakfast event. The topic was about how mission statements engage (or not) your employees. Gwen’s session drove home a point for me and I’d like to share it here. She put us in small groups and handed out two mission…

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Matrix Organization: At Best, a One-Off

Whenever volatility occurs in the market, companies start thinking about how to reorganize themselves so that they can cope with those changes effectively. But since they’re trapped by traditional thinking, they tend to recycle old models rather than to create new ones. One such model is matrix; and like so many that have gone before…

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Blueprint for Building an Internal Change Management Capability

The Business Imperative Everyone has heard the statistic. Two-thirds of all change initiatives fail to achieve their expected business benefits – a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970s to the present. This failure rate represents billions of dollars in lost productivity, wasted resources, opportunity costs and rework—not to mention the negative impact on…

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