In The Classroom: Leading Change & Organizational Renewal

What Works and What Doesn’t in Leading Change & Organizational Renewal:

• Working on Business Challenges: Participants are divided into groups of seven or eight and they all work on one participant’s business challenge. So the program taps the collective intelligence and experiences of a group to help an individual sort through his or her key issue at work.
• Design Thinking: “That was particularly fun!” says a student in the class. “The best thing was that they gave us a process. I wasn’t even aware of how empathy was a part of it.”
• The Method: According to one participant, the balance of theory and application and peer support was really helpful.
• The Solution isn’t Everything: “In our case study work groups and in the design thinking exercise, we have been told to hold ourselves back from solutions. That is so hard because we are all Type A problem-solving critical evaluators,” says one executive in the course. “This was another dimension on how do you make sure you are solving the right problem.”
• Participatory: “It’s not a one-way conversation that the professors are sticking to. They allow the students to formulate the class content and discussion,” says Scott Regalado, director of information technology, tanker programs at the Boeing Co.
• Top-notch Professors: The LCOR features several of Stanford’s rock stars including Robert Burgelman, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Huggy Rao, and, of course, Harvard’s Michael Tushman.

The Basics:

Leading Change and Organizational Renewal

Faculty director: Charles A. O’Reilly III, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management, at Stanford. Michael Tushman, the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration, at Harvard

Program dates: 18-23 March 2012 (Harvard), 3-8 June 2012 (Harvard), 4-9 November 2012 (Stanford) Application Deadline: 5 October 2012

Cost: $14,000 (inclusive of accommodation and meals)

Location: Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School