Graduate Studies Blog
Article written by Venkatsubrmaniam
Guest lecture, from leading industry professionals, is something every MBA student keenly looks forward to. And when a leading McKinsey consultant happens to be the guest lecturer, the expectations and excitements are naturally very high.
Professor Pete R. Giulioni, former consultant and now a professor at NBS, conducted a workshop on Change Management for the Fellows MBA students. He was also kind enough to request one of his contacts at McKinsey to conduct a session on Change Management. The primary objective of this guest lecture was to provide real world insights and experiences backing the Change Management concepts and theories taught in the workshop.
Anna J. Breimer, a senior consultant & expert at McKinsey specializing in Org Solutions, was the guest speaker for the day.
Anna’s Background: Anna completed her MBA from INSEAD and was an exchange student at Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Post completing her MBA, Anna joined Philips as Senior Manager Corporate Strategy – ASEAN & PACIFIC CEO Office. Prior to her MBA, Anna worked with McKinsey, for almost 3 years, as Associate. She rejoined McKinsey in 2014 as an associate and has been with them ever since. At McKinsey, she grew from Associate to Engagement Manager and is currently an Expert on Org Solutions.
The guest lecture was planned for 3.5 hours and topic of lecture was, “Thriving on Change – How companies successfully navigate change”.
Anna began the session with major forces disrupting organization, both from outside-in and inside-out, basically touching upon how organizations are changing in the present world. She then moved to elaborate on value of organizational health and gave us some statistical insights explaining the difficulties companies face in maintaining performance over time. The session also touched upon the importance of measuring and managing the org health on par with performance metrics, highlighting the key correlation between org health and performance.
The session then moved towards Change Management, where Anna explained the top reasons, on why change programs fail. She then explained a few concepts that she follows at McKinsey to drive change programs and shared some sample dashboard on how to measure the progress. The session also covered change under the surface, four building blocks of change, how to influence change and the most important aspect of change program – speed vs stability. She explained the importance of Agility for organizations, shared some real-life examples on how some big organizations successfully managed to sustain performance over a period consistently, by staying agile and the importance of adopting agility.
Personally speaking, what I loved about this session was the way in which Anna fused the theoretical concepts with practical real life cases and most importantly explained how these theories can be applied or applied (from her experience), from a consultant perspective. The examples that Anna brought to the table were recent and relevant to the current challenges faced by organizations. This industry perspective coupled with the fact that it was presented by someone who is an expert in driving such change programs, made the session, most exciting and absorbing.
