Katzenbach Center

The Katzenbach Center focuses on the development and application of innovative ideas for organizational culture and change, based on a guiding philosophy of client-based innovation. The Center promotes new thinking on achieving breakthroughs in higher performance, developed through active collaboration with clients and thought leaders around the world.

Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner

A Perspective on Organizational Culture
Organizational culture empowers and challenges companies in today’s business world. A culture that supports strategic and operational goals can fuel performance and spark innovation and differentiation. If the culture opposes strategy, however, the results can be disastrous. Many business leaders understand that culture plays an important role in their businesses, but most have difficulty understanding how to use culture to improve performance.

The traditional discourse on the subject often relies on abstract descriptions and “fuzzy” language, which are not easily translated into pragmatic and timely solutions. It is no surprise then that many leaders choose to avoid culture change altogether; in doing so, they either try to work around their culture or use it as an excuse for poor performance.

We believe that it is best to work with and within an organization’s existing culture. By focusing on useful elements of the existing culture, leaders can identify key behaviors that will bring them closer to their cultural aspirations. A culture intervention program can deploy both informal and formal levers to promote these behaviors, which will shift mindsets and drive long-term performance impact.read more >

Motivating Behavior Change
Boosting Performance by Mobilizing Pride Builders
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) >

Leading Outside the Lines
How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results
Every enterprise has an informal as well as a formal organization. The formal is the side with which business people are usually most familiar. It consists of analyses, strategies, structures, processes, and programs — all codified in memos, charts and power-point presentations. These tools are designed to align decisions and actions.

The informal is generally less familiar. It consists of emerging ideas, social networks, working norms, values, peer relationships, and communities of common interest — the elements that often hide beyond the boundaries of the formal. In Leading Outside the Lines, authors Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan make the compelling case that it is in the less familiar informal world where magic happens … yet one without the other is unlikely to sustain peak performance over time.read more >

Unleashing the Power of Teams
From Theory to Execution
In most organizations, the untapped performance potential from teams is enormous. While the fundamental theory of team performance is perhaps well known, many teams fall short of their full potential because they fail to move from theory to execution, particularly when it comes to making critical decisions about when, where, and how to team.

In workshops focused on applying team fundamentals to real business challenges, senior leaders can learn to recognize the significance of different types of teams and when they should be employed, while generating immediate business impact. After senior leadership has successfully embraced and internalized strategic teaming, top managers should develop the institutional capability to spread these behaviors throughout the organization.download (1.1mb, PDF) >

China Sales Force Effectiveness
Building Pride and Performance
For many multinationals, China is a difficult sales environment, but an absolutely critical one. Multinationals cannot ignore the expansion of new consumer markets in the country, but many are struggling to figure out how to sell products in a vast region with a remarkably diverse set of sales channels, consumer preferences, and economic strata. Sales chiefs must recognize the importance of the unique skills of what we call Pride Builders — master motivators — able to achieve unprecedented team performance by tapping into profound insights about what uniquely drives each individual.download (1.4mb, PDF) >

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