The Individualized Corporation

"The last visit of Halley's comet coincided with the convergence of several important environmental forces that were forcing most companies not merely to adjust or adapt as they had in the past but to confront the need for transformational change."

"We have developed a set of integrated ideas and a conceptual framework that we believe provides managers with a mental map of the new corporate terrain."

"This might have been just another impressive but otherwise unremarkable turnaround, except for one thing. The transformation was accomplished by the same management team that had previously delivered the flat sales and break-even profitability."

"The transformation task will be different for different companies and adapted to the unique situations of each company."

"Self-discipline is the performance standard that comes from within each individual. Unlike control, it is not imposed from above."

"Only they can move beyond the banality of such homilies as people are our most important assets and initiate the series of changes we have described to the organizational infrastructure."

"In the name of efficiency and accountability, the divisionalized hierarchies place a premium on divided accountability at the expense of broader cross-unit collaboration that drives organizational learning."

"We identified several common elements that seemed to be vital to having a self-renewing capability."

"Continuous self-renewal is built on the tension that develops between two symbiotic forces."

"The power of the behavioral context lies in its impact on the behavior of individual organization members."

"Like social leaders, top management creates the challenge and commitment necessary to drive change and ensure that the company continuously renews itself."

"When it comes to companies, most organizations operate on a long-standing and firmly established belief in what might be called a Russian doll model of management."

"As most high-performance organizations come to realize, [training] is most effective when it is focused on the task of developing competency elements that relate to an individual's existing knowledge and experience."

"We developed a model that seemed to capture the transformational experience of several of the companies we were studying, including ABB, Motorola, Komatsu, AT&T and Corning."

"Like many companies in the first stage of the transformation process, GE was going through a period that many described as inverting the pyramid."

"What we call the new moral contract is more than a fresh spin on a company's old human resource policies to legitimize layoffs."

"Having spent the past six years observing the managers of more than twenty companies in the midst of major transformational change, we come away with a sense of both excitement and optimism."