June 2011

The Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company is proud to present the latest edition of Katzenbach Foresight, our newsletter, where we push intellectual boundaries in leadership, organization, culture, and human capital.

In this edition, we highlight our perspective on key elements of culture and behavior change. We also present our latest approach to improving the performance and effectiveness of teams throughout the organization.

We appreciate your interest in the Katzenbach Center and warmly welcome your comments and questions. Please feel free to send us your feedback or contact the authors of each article directly.

Best regards,

Jon Katzenbach
Senior Partner, Booz & Company

In this Issue

Unleashing the Power of Teams
by Jon Katzenbach, Aurelie Viriot, August Vlak
In most organizations, the untapped performance potential from teams is enormous. Many teams fall short of their potential because they fail to make critical decisions about when, where, and how to team. With attention and diligence, companies can fairly rapidly move from team theory to execution and improve the performance and effectiveness of their teams – at the top and throughout the broader organization.download (1.1mb, PDF) >

Eat Your Peas
by Rutger van Post
When celebrity chef Jamie Oliver arrived in Huntington, West Virginia to reform the unhealthy eating habits of its denizens, he assumed that just communicating the facts of a healthy-eating lifestyle would be enough. He quickly found that he was wrong and needed to change the community’s culture from within. We examine how Oliver's methodology—defining organizational aspirations, promoting desired behaviors, and coupling formal and informal mechanisms of change—are highly relevant to companies seeking to improve their performance by changing their cultures.read more >

Motivating Behavior Change
by Jon Katzenbach, Laird Post, Jonathan Gruber, Aurelie Viriot
Despite investing heavily in formal initiatives such as incentives or training programs, organizations often find it difficult to drive the critical behavior changes required to elevate business performance. The problem is they neglect an essential aspect of what motivates employees—the emotional commitment that they must bring to the institution and to their jobs to do well. “Pride Builders”—employees who instinctively know how to connect what drives individuals with their day-to-day activities and thereby instill pride in the work— can play a substantial role in making behavior change happen.download (8.8mb, PDF) >

CEO Succession 2010: The Four Types of CEOs
by K. Favaro, P.-O. Karlsson, G. L. Neilson
Every year, Booz & Company takes a long and penetrating look at CEO succession among the world’s top 2,500 public companies. This year, we looked at the role of the CEO and its effect on tenure and turnover. How hands-on are the CEO and his or her senior team? How do they engage themselves with the businesses they lead? We found that these factors have a noticeable effect. The more involved headquarters is in operational decision making in any given company, the more tenuous the CEO’s tenure is likely to be.read more >