Seth Kahan on Big Change

I’ve noticed a shift in attitude from my clients. They see and acknowledge the pressures their leaders face outside of the corporate world and how those pressures impact business strategy and goals. People are under a tremendous amount of stress in and out of the office. We can no longer ask our leaders to attend […]

I’m involved in several initiatives where associations work to understand how conferences will evolve over the next 3-5 years. When forecasting, one handicap suffered by many people is the assumption that the rate of change will remain constant. But it won’t. The rate of change will be cut to a fraction of what it once

It’s the fall of 2021, and meetings are beginning to return. Half of the face-to-face meetings I had scheduled for September and October hare canceled due to pandemic safety concerns. The pandemic has made scheduling meetings, especially if you’re working with hotels or conference centers, challenging. Lisa Levine, CEO of the Energy Bar Association, shared

I discovered a tool that that is extraordinarily useful in my work with CEOs. This tool is called the Productive Zone of Disequilibrium, a term coined by Ronald Heifetz, co-developer of the Adaptive Leadership framework. Heifetz defines the productive zone of disequilibrium as the optimal range of distress within which the urgency in the system

Executive presence is a critical factor of leadership, but what it takes to create it is still up for discussion? Is it charisma, magnetism, inspiration, or one of the many factors experts have identified? My colleague Susan Bates has developed a fantastic tool to assess executive presence. The Bates Executive Presence Index™ (The Bates ExPI™)

Many of my clients are involved in creating tomorrow’s meetings, and I serve on several task forces to design them. As we plan future events, we must remember the goal of meetings – to bring people together and make it possible to generate, develop and disseminate knowledge while we create sessions that speak to the

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of change work, with both small companies where everyone is co-located and large organizations where staff is distributed worldwide. I’ve found the one thing they all have in common is the need for staff to understand the change initiative.  They need to understand, at its essence, what it’s

I do a lot of work on Grand Challenges – big, bold goals designed to change the world for the better – and they require alliances to create a unified thrust. All Grand Challenges require building a leadership strategy team – the inner circle – that will steer the initiative by working together to seize

I am engaged in a large-scale change initiative with a major institution. The work reminds me of the success I’ve had helping other organizations – like the World Bank and Royal Dutch Shell – with culture change. The major lesson learned from all these works is that communities – groups of professionals who share a

I’ve had the opportunity to preside over ten large-scale change initiatives in complex decentralized organizations, some of which span the globe. One of the things that I’ve come to learn is how organic really good change is. We live in the era of knowledge work, significantly different than the manufacturing of the industrial age. Knowledge