WHARTON LEADERSHIP
DIGEST
September,
2002, Volume 6, Number 12
 New
Deputy Editor for the Wharton Leadership Digest
Paul Sheppard joins the Wharton Leadership Digest as
our new Deputy Editor. Paul is a second-year student in the Wharton MBA
program, and he is a former writer and continuing contributor to the Financial
Times. Paul can be reached at paulks@wharton.upenn.edu.
CONTENTS
 By Kate
Faber, Wharton Leadership Center
John
Kotter’s new book, The Heart of Change,
written with Dan Cohen, offers an eight-fold way for creating effective change
initiatives. Significant and
lasting change, he argues, requires that companies convey the change agendas in
ways that everybody appreciates them not only intellectually and but also
emotionally.
The “central issue is never
strategy, structure, culture, or systems,” writes Kotter.
“All those elements, and others, are important. But
the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and
behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to
people’s feelings.”
 Building on the notion that
people must first see a problem, then feel its consequences, and finally become
emotionally charged to so something about it, Kotter offers eight steps for
guiding a change initiative:
Step One: Increase Urgency.
If individuals aren’t able to see the problem, make the problem
dramatically visible. A procurement
manager piled 424 different types of gloves on a conference table for his staff
to see, driving home the need for streamlining his company’s purchasing
practices.
Step Two: Build the Guiding
Team. Create mutual trust and confidence among the main players who
will have to carry the change into the ranks.
Step Three: Spread the
Vision and Strategy. Rather
than just sending a call for change, demonstrate
what the new vision and strategy mean by evidencing them in your own altered
behavior.
Step Four: Communicate for
Buy-In. If the change initiative requires that your staff work late
into many evenings, but sure to be there too.
Step Five: Empower Action.
Employees must feel the need for action and then be free to make the
right changes. If someone still
cannot see the need for action, put them in a position to do so. “Loan”
a resistant manager to an unhappy customer to experience first-hand the problems
that customers experience.
Step Six: Create Short-Term
Wins. Training for a marathon requires that a runner build upon
shorter distances in the early days to successfully complete the full distance
on marathon day. In the same way,
manager must create short-term wins on the way to the big victory.
Early wins model what ultimate success will look like, and they energize
everybody to stay the course.
Step Seven: Don’t Let Up.
It’s a long march, but it can be completed if you are determined to go
all the way. Honesty about the
arduous journey ahead helps, and so does the frequent recognition of all those
who are helping along the way.
Step Eight: Make Change
Stick. Celebrate all the milestones, and circulate letters from
satisfied customers, notes from delighted stockholders, and articles from
impressed journalists.
Change is inherently prolonged
and hard, and inspiring hundreds or even thousands of others to join you on the
journey can be daunting. But by
tapping into their feelings – by touching their hearts with compelling
stories, actions, and events – you build on the emotions that are essential
for your change agenda to go forward and succeed.
Note:
Kate Faber can be reached at kfaber@wharton.upenn.edu.
The book: John Kotter and Dan Cohen, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories
of How People Change Their Organizations (Boston: Harvard Business School
Press, 2002).
Expedition
Behavior:
Working Well Together in the Wilderness and Beyond
 Chris
Maxwell, Associate Director, Wharton Undergraduate Leadership Program
Good
expedition behavior – respectfulness, flexibility, tolerance of others,
courtesy, direct communication, self-awareness, and teamwork – becomes
critical when traveling in small groups in remote areas.
These skills are also the hallmark of high-performing teams in the
workplace.
To
develop these and other skills needed to lead groups both in the wilderness and
at work, seven educators, a professional climbing guide, and a U.S. Marine Corps
captain joined a program this past August of the National Outdoor Leadership
School (NOLS) held in the rugged terrain surrounding Washington’s Mt. Rainier.
Nadine
Andrié, NOLS instructor explained that good expedition behavior “can be the
difference between an average course experience and a great one.”
The expedition experience is centrally concerned with “learning each
other’s strengths and growth areas, teaching, coaching and supporting each
other” in physically challenging settings.
And that, she said is “one of the most transferable skills from the
backcountry to the workplace.”
Marine
Captain Tom Przybelski came to the course to compare military and civilian
styles of leadership and team building in a harsh environment and then to learn
what he could take back into the Marines. “An
outdoor program is at its best,” he added, “when it is able to teach
life-skills in addition to the nuts and bolts of living in the backcountry,”
and he was particularly impressed with how fast and fully the group transformed
itself from nine unrelated individuals into a close-knit team that was ready to
surmount whatever challenges the wilderness presented.
The
lessons of wilderness expeditions are becoming of value to other organizations,
too. As NASA astronauts move from short trips in space shuttles to
many months on the International Space Station, expedition capacities are
becoming increasingly important, and astronauts are now being readied for space
with trips to the backcountry. Today,
nearly a third of all U.S. astronauts have been on a leadership expedition
co-organized by NOLS and NASA.
While
most of us are likely to remain earth-bound for the foreseeable future, it’s
clear that good expedition behavior learned in the backcountry can be highly
useful for surviving in our own “frontcountry."
Note:
Chris Maxwell can be contacted at maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu,
and information on NOLS is available at http://www.nols.edu/NOLSHome.html.
Mastering
Management Mid-Career:
The Wharton MBA for Executives
 By
Howard Kaufold, Director of the Wharton Executive MBA Program
Many professionals come to a point in their
careers where the lessons from an MBA become essential for continued leadership,
but not everyone can step out to the workforce for two years to fill in those
missing skills. The Wharton MBA for Executives (WEMBA) can impart the rigorous
Wharton MBA curriculum in two years while allowing them to continue their
full-time work. Students earn the same degree, fulfill the same credit
requirements, and attend the same graduation as traditional Wharton MBA
students. The primary difference is that on-campus work is focused into intense
sessions on alternate weekends spent either on Wharton’s Philadelphia campus
or its new (2001) San Francisco-based Wharton West Center.
The
living-and-learning environment – with classrooms, dining and group meeting
spaces – is designed to promote interaction and minimize distractions. In
addition to the Friday/Saturday sessions, students participate in several
four-day sessions over the course of the program, and attend a one-week
international seminar at a destination chosen by each class. The
every-other-week residential format and choice of two locations allows students
to commute from a wide area, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles,
Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Austin, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, even Sao
Paulo and Paris, as well as the Philadelphia and San Francisco regions.
The faculty is
drawn from Wharton’s body of teachers and researchers, and students learn in
Wharton’s collaborative, team-based format. Between the days spent in class,
students study on their own, work with their team members in person or over the
Internet, interact with faculty and professors as needed, and participate in the
best learning laboratory yet devised – the real business world.
Says Abby Greensfelder, WG’02, a director of
programming and strategy for the Discovery Channel, “There were 11 of us who
came up on the train from Washington and it became a group exercise, working on
the way up on the 7 a.m. train Friday morning and recounting stories on the way
home on Saturday. We actually did a project related to my work at the Discovery
Channel, a study of recruitment and retention in the new media business. I also
have used insights from the program to create a model for programming
profitability that is not solely based on ratings.”
Despite the benefits, an executive MBA isn’t
right for everyone. Most students have more experience than those in traditional
MBA programs – the average length of experience at Wharton is ten years for
executive students compared to six years for traditional MBA students. All
students are required to have some level of support from their employer – at
minimum, accommodation of the scheduling demands of the course and ranging up to
full tuition sponsorship. And all students must figure out how to handle the
demands of full-time study with full-time work. But for the stout of heart, an
executive MBA can be a fast-track to career advancement for students who already
have a wealth of experience.
“Since so much of the work at Wharton is
group-based, you end up finding out a lot about your own strengths and
weaknesses, and what kinds of people complement you as a leader and a team
member,” says Greensfelder. “It was a life-changing endeavor.”
Note:
Howard Kaufold can be reached at kaufold@wharton.upenn.edu,
and information on the Wharton Executive MBA Program is available at http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/wemba.
Corporate
Governance and Organization:
Conference at
Italy’s Bocconi
University
Bocconi
University, one of Italy’s leading institutions, is celebrating its centennial
with a conference on “Corporate Governance and Firm Organization” in Milan
on December 5 and 6, 2002. The
organizers are Anna Grandori of Bocconi
University, Nicolai Foss of the Copenhagen Business School, and Mark Ebers, of
the European Group for Organizational Studies.
The conference is focusing upon
models of corporate governance, how they affect the internal organization of
firms, and how the company’s architecture in turn influences governance. The
conference draws upon academic research but is also intended to inform
initiatives currently underway in Europe to prepare new codes for good
governance. Participants are drawn
from Asia and America along with Europe, and U.S. presenters include Margaret
Blair, Michael Piore, and Mark Roe.
Anna Grandori, the conference’s chief organizer can be reached at anna.grandori@uni-bocconi.it.
Copyright
© 1996-2002, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania
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