MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Strengthen Your Change Muscle for Competitive Advantage

To create a competitive advantage in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, building an organizational change muscle is as important, if not more so, than having a great strategy, well-run operations, or the right talent. While the ability to react quickly to emerging trends, threats, and opportunities has been necessary for successful businesses for centuries, the pace of change in the past few decades has made it the most critical element for success.

The blacksmith’s foundry had to adapt to new technologies and customer demands on the scale of centuries, while car companies of the mid-20th century had to adapt to changing regulations and customer preferences on the scale of decades. Today, adapting to external changes is an almost constant need that takes place on the scale of months, if not weeks. It is, of course, not enough just to know that you need to adapt; you must also know what adaptations are necessary, how to make those changes, and how quickly they must be made.

About the Author

Gaurav Gupta is a managing director at business consultancy Kotter and a coauthor of the book Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times (Wiley, 2021). John Kotter is the founder and chairman of Kotter, a bestselling author of 18 books, and the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. Vanessa Akhtar is a managing director at Kotter and coauthor of Change. Nick Petschek is a managing director at Kotter and leads the firm’s European practice.

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