The saying “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” needs an upgrade—because when hard times hit, what we need more than anything from our staff (and ourselves) is resilience. My friend and colleague Robert Goldberg weighs in on this topic in a recent article on fortune.com. "Resilience,” says Robert, founder and managing partner of Greensboro, NC-based consulting firm Organization Insight, “is like a force field. If a group learns it can withstand pressures, failures

The keys to competitive success in the new decade will be different from those of the past. This interactive bcg.com article explains steps to create a company equal to the challenges of the 2020s. An Era of Uncertainty and Volatility: Accelerating technological change, social polarization, political gridlock, geopolitical power shifts, and increased public scrutiny of business all point to an era of protracted uncertainty and volatility. Company lifespans are shrinking. Only

How do we assess and handle potentially volatile conditions, or high uncertainty situations, in business and beyond? Rita McGrath, a Columbia Business School professor, gives insights on how to spot big changes and know how to react in her new book, Seeing Around Corners. Where is this volatility coming from? What people used to think of as fairly safe, secure, core businesses are going through the same kinds of uncertainty that we always used to associate with innovation. In

In a recent hbr.org article, Dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, Bill Boulding, describes how successful leaders today and in decades to come must possess triple-threat leadership capability: IQ+EQ+DQ—the familiar intellect and emotional intelligence aspects, plus one that must be recognized and elevated: decency. Competency in business is essential, and intellect, or IQ, is the broad idea of business competency and an understanding of what it takes to be succ

Korn Ferry contributor Daniel Goleman describes the spontaneous joy, even rapture, of optimal mental performance, or "flow", as a state of neural harmony. The experience of losing yourself in a creative project, like developing an app or writing a story, or having competed at the top of your game, either athletically or mentally. Flow is a state that underlies our best performance on the task at hand as we channel positive feelings in an energized pursuit with an undistracted

As humans, we are conditioned to seek affiliation through families and tribes, together establishing rules to create safety, belonging, and even accomplishing something meaningful. In business, our tribes are linked by a leader, a shared purpose or goal, a common culture, or an organizational boundary. Belonging to a business tribe awakens our collaborative instincts, where we can identify key competitors and work collectively to defeat them. We must also recognize that triba

Organizations aren't getting the performance they need from their teams. That's the message we hear from many of our clients wrestling with complex challenges ranging from strategic planning to change management. Often, the fault doesn't lie with the team members—rather, it rests with leaders who fail to effectively tap diverse work styles and perspectives—even at the senior-most levels. To help leaders claim this lost value, Deloitte has created a system called Business Chem

Over the past decade, McKinsey has studied the impact of a wide range of management practices affecting organizational health based on processes and structures that reinforce organizational stability. In 2013, questions were added based on speed and stability, which turned out to be a surprisingly strong predictor of organizational health and, ultimately, of performance. Companies that combine speed and stability can be described as agile, and McKinsey learned that relatively