| McKinsey Classics | August 2018 |
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| Coping with tumultuous change |
| Successful executives generally don’t have much experience of failure, so they may not really understand how to cope with it when it comes. Yet failure—or at least the dramatic upending of old formulas for success—is precisely what executives face in times of tumultuous change. The value of experience plummets. Time horizons shrivel dramatically, while mandates become muddled, ambiguous, and highly changeable. Meanwhile, fearful executives scramble to redesign their strategies again and again, but time-tested approaches to business slow down the organization’s response to external threats. Yet even in the face of these misfortunes, many executives stubbornly deny that the old ways must go. Fear and denial aren’t novel challenges, of course, but more and more senior executives are succumbing to them in today’s shockingly tough and fast-changing environment. Read our 2009 classic “A CEO’s guide to reenergizing the senior team” to learn how chief executives can help their top people work through the issues created by far-reaching change—including the powerful emotions it inevitably generates. |
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| Did you miss our previous McKinsey Classics? |
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| The ‘soft’ side of change |
| Companies need not only technical solutions and tools but also the soft, organizational elements of change to improve their operations. Read our 2008 classic “From lean to lasting: Making operational improvements stick.” |
| Strike the right balance → |
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