This blog comes courtesy of one of our students. At the end of an intensive course, he sat back and reflected that half of what we taught was based on getting aspiring and improving leaders to actually do the preparation work and the other half was following through on execution.

It was a great summary, but out of context, it doesn’t tell anyone outside the class much.

To make it more useful, we’ll dig a little deeper into each of the areas. The purpose is to give you an overview so you can build your own map.

Doing the preparation work is hard for some people. Some people are good at starting but not finishing. Others are good at finishing, but don’t know where to start.

The preparatory work happens on 2 levels: the big picture (the long game) and the immediate.

Big picture preparatory work includes:

1. Understand your organization, your customers and how value is created
2. Understand your role in the organization and how that connects to customer value
3. Understand the...

Welcome back everyone!

One of the great parts of blogging while you're in the middle of other major projects is that every day's meetings and interactions give you more topics to write about. This week had it's fair share of interesting interactions, but you'll have to tune in later for those since we're in the middle of a two-part series.

In Part 1, we saw that leading change could be broken down in to two distinct phases based on the different activities and different emphasis on communication between the Initiation Phase and the Implementation Phase. We focused our efforts in Part 1 on the initiation phase. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it [here].Even if you have read it, sometimes it's good to recap.

There are two parts to Leading change: the first part is about developing the change initiative, and the second part is about implementing the change.

The kinds of things you do, as a leader, and the kinds of conversations you have are different in each of these...