Latest thinking
Karen Thomas-Bland, founder at Seven, regularly writes and speaks on the subjects of business transformation, M&A integration, executive boards and leadership. We also contribute to leading business websites and publications.
Business transformations are notoriously risky - there are ten questions I use when talking to anyone who is about to embark on one to reduce this risk.
When you assume you are bringing together two cultures, it's often significantly more than that in a merger. You often bring together people with very different values, behaviours, leadership styles, mindsets, and policies. The integration challenge is winning the hearts and minds of all employees and giving them a compelling vision to buy into.
There are ways to de-risk your transformation effort by focusing arguably on the most complex transformation of all - changing human behaviour.
The Board plays a fundamental role in a Transformation’s success. It needs to satisfy itself that there is clear ambition and direction for the Transformation, that leadership are up for the challenge, and that the right balance is being achieved between transforming and operating the business.
An interesting discussion yesterday on transformation trends for 2023 including being bolder & more courageous in the transformation ambition set and even tighter connection to value creation.
Embarking on a transformation is one of the most critical decisions a leader will ever make. So what makes a transformation successful?
Four areas: commit to the transformation, lead the transformation from the front, find ways to sustain a new way of working and personally go ‘all in’.
Takeovers are a time to knit people together rather than exclude them. Karen recently wrote for The Loop on how to manage personal egos in a takeover, specifically focusing on Elon Musk and Twitter.
Karen is the featured guest on an episode of the Dreams with Deadlines podcast. She talks about her experience as a business transformation consultant and what makes some transformations succeed and others fail, the reasons for failures and how it can be avoided.
Karen Thomas-Bland, founder of Seven Transformation, talks to Raconteur about the success of England’s Lionesses in the recent World Cup, how the key drivers to this were team building and culture and the lessons businesses can learn from this.