Blog

See our experts’ latest contributions on consulting, execution, growth, simplification and other key topics in today’s industry-leading blog posts.

04.14.20  Robert Schaffer , Richard Bobbe

Rethinking Strategy: Using Incremental Successes to Achieve Major Shifts

The incremental successes approach is not just a way to achieve more correct decisions – it is a way to change strategic decision-making itself from a high risk game to a minimum risk game. It may not be applicable in every situation, but it will be a powerful meth…

Categories: Strategy Execution, Rapid Results
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10.26.17  Robert Schaffer

All Management Is Change Management

Managers have begun to view change as an extraordinary event that must be dealt with using change management techniques and special skills. However, the job of management has always involved defining what changes need to be made and seeing that those changes take p…

Categories: Harvard Business Review, Executive Alignment and Coaching, Leadership Development
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01.29.16  Robert Schaffer

To Get Better at Your Job, Work Practice into Your Routine

Skill building requires practice. Everyone seems to understand this – musicians, basketball stars, chess players, artists, etc. Why don’t business managers? In order to benefit from practice, big tasks must be broken into smaller elements that can be worked on over…

Categories: Operational Excellence, Harvard Business Review
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09.16.14  Robert Schaffer , Jonathan Stearn

A Test to Weed Out Consultants You Shouldn’t Hire

We’ve seen a lot of consulting “misses” over the years – polished management products and services that fail to achieve what the clients want. Often it’s because executives recruit their consultants the wrong way.

Categories: Harvard Business Review, Executive Alignment and Coaching
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01.10.14  Robert Schaffer

Messages from Our Interviews with Healthcare Leaders

There is a perfect storm of challenges forming in healthcare – from the regulatory and reimbursement changes being driven by the Affordable Care Act, to the aging of the population, to the consistent increase in costs over the last few decades.

Categories: Strategy Execution, Operational Excellence, Executive Alignment and Coaching
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07.17.13  Robert Schaffer

Principles That Stand the Test of Time

Imagine coming face to face today with a problem you “solved” in the distant past. A weird phenomenon that occurs in Montreal every year was the subject of a recent New York Times story. Everyone who is moving his household tries to do it on (or very near) July 1 b…

Categories: Operational Excellence, Rapid Results
Comments: 0

12.06.12  Robert Schaffer

To Change the Culture, Stop Trying to "Change the Culture"

Sweeping, large-scale culture change efforts rarely cure those aspects of organizational culture that were so frustrating in the first place. Senior management must help change happen incrementally and then knit together individual strands of progress.

Categories: Operational Excellence, Executive Alignment and Coaching, Leadership Development
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09.10.12  Robert Schaffer

Make the Job a Game

Most working people can be highly enthusiastic about all sorts of things in their lives yet go to work with no sense of enthusiasm or fun. People love to play, but work for the most part isn't much fun. Learn how to help your employees come to life and get things d…

Categories: Operational Excellence, Harvard Business Review, Executive Alignment and Coaching
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10.19.11  Robert Schaffer

Events: The Robert H. Schaffer Award

The Inaugural Robert H. Schaffer Award for Best Paper in Applied International Management was presented to Dr. Francesco Ciabuschi, Dr. Oscar Martin, and Dr. Henrik Dellestrand at the Academy of Management's annual meeting in San Antonio on August 15. Their paper, …

Categories: Innovation
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09.15.10  Robert Schaffer

Schaffer Consulting Publishes Eleventh HBR Article

With the world changing rapidly around them, managers spend lot a lot of their time making sure they keep up or get ahead. And yet, despite all this preoccupation with change, there are some self-limiting patterns into which many managers are locked. I describe the…

Categories: Executive Alignment and Coaching
Comments: 0
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