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.

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 >

The Right Fight

Harmony and alignment are not always the best way to get the most out of organizations. Contrary to conventional management wisdom, leaders can unleash creativity, innovation, and the productive potential of their employees by strategically employing “right fights.” The fundamental premise: A certain amount of struggle and stress energizes organizations and individuals, leading to optimal execution. Read more >

The Empathy Engine: Turning Customer Service into a Sustainable Advantage

Common sense tells us customer service is important to a company's success. The majority of corporate executives embrace it, and almost all  customers demand (or at least prefer) it. But achieving a high level of customer service—and sustaining it over the long haul—is a goal that has eluded all but a relatively small number of companies.

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Mobilizing the Informal Organization

This entertaining and informative report demonstrates—through real-life stories, illustrations, and yes, numbers—how the common-sense notion of the informal organization can be the key to uncommon practices that drive innovation, cross-functional collaboration, constant improvement, and customer service.

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