World-Class Research, Real-World Insights
Our work builds on four decades of research by our founders, Professor Michael Tushman (Harvard Business School), Professor Charles O’Reilly (Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Andy Binns. Change Logic has extended this research, building a practical toolkit that marries research to practical application. We are published regularly in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the California Management Review. We collaborate with client CEOs on many of our research projects, helping to bring real world insight into our work.
Founders Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly, and Andrew Binns
CHANGE LOGIC TEAM AUTHORED BOOKS
Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game
Andrew Binns, Charles O’Reilly, and Michael Tushman
Corporate Explorers are the new heroes of the corporate world who turn disruption into opportunity. They are part entrepreneurs, using innovation disciplines to jump start cutting-edge ideas, and part change leaders, capable of creating support for investment. They see that corporations already own the ideas, resources, and—critically—the talent to build new ventures. Entrepreneurs take notice—it’s time for Corporate Explorers to set the pace and chart the course for disruption.
Lead and Disrupt
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman
The Ambidextrous Organization is a proven strategy for pursuing disruptive growth in mature organizations. It creates the flexibility to adapt in fast-changing environments so that they can ideate, incubate, and scale new ventures. Using examples from firms like Amazon, IBM, and Cisco, O’Reilly and Tushman describe how a succession of firms have put in place a systematic approach to moving into new market areas, without losing focus on the existing core business franchise.
Winning through Innovation
Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly
Winning Through Innovation provides a methodology for organizational change using the award-winning Congruence Model. The method explains how firms define performance or opportunity gaps, diagnose root causes of these problems, and design actions to address them. The book is the foundation for Tushman and O’Reilly’s executive education program, Leading Change and Organizational Renewal, which has been running at the Harvard and Stanford business schools for thirty years.
Industry Leading Whitepapers
Six Breakdowns in the Process for Disruptive Innovation
Andrew Binns
Change Logic has over fifteen years of experience helping companies beat the odds and build disruptive new businesses. Based on our research and practical experience, we have isolated the six most common breakdowns in the process for disruptive innovation. This whitepaper outlines where organizations struggle most, ways to proactively avoid common innovation pitfalls, how leading companies overcame obstacles to innovation, and how to increase the odds of success.
How Can Biopharma Firms Innovate Beyond the Molecule?
Aaron Leopold
In this whitepaper, the Change Logic team describes the challenge of innovating beyond the molecule in a drug development-driven environment, the key success factors for starting on this path, and why pharma firms should act now if they are to realize maximum returns.
Beating the Odds of Disruption
Andy Binns, Christine Griffin, and Aaron Leopold
Large firms often struggle to prosper in the face of market disruption. Recently, many have adopted Design Thinking and ‘Lean Agile’ techniques, but have these techniques moved the needle towards building disruptive new businesses? Are incumbents any better placed to beat disruption? And, if some are, what can we learn about how they’ve succeeded where others have failed? In this white paper, we conducted research from interviews with 30 firms and over 150 executives to find the answers.
Fast Company Articles
March 17, 2022: Six Ways To Shine As A Workplace Rebel And Not Be A Jerk
February 14, 2022: Silent Killer Of Exploration: How Culture Kills Innovation
October 27, 2021: Can Corporate Explorers Save Companies From The Startup Threat
June 17, 2021: Is Your Innovation Breaking Down?
Additional Publications & Articles
Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People
Charles O’Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer
Culture is often regarded as both the most important and least understood aspect of organizations. In Hidden Value, Charles O’Reilly and co-author Jeff Pfeffer make culture a tangible and practical instrument of leadership. They describe how a variety of organizations design mechanisms that make culture a source of competitive advantage, aligned tightly to the company’s business model, and a key reason for business success.
The Three Stages of Disruptive Innovation
Andy Binns and Charles O’Reilly
In this award-winning California Management review article, Binns and O’Reilly describe the research underpinning Change Logic’s approach to Ideation, Incubation, and Scaling new businesses in established organizations. They highlight how the many methodologies for Ideation and Incubation tend to ignore the challenges of converting great ideas into successful revenue streams. Using case studies from IBM and Amazon, they explain the mechanisms for putting in place a repeatable process for new business creation.
“Both/And” Leadership
Wendy K. Smith, Marianne Lewis, and Michael L. Tushman
Leaders face a multitude of strategic paradoxes—contradictory pressures that are too often viewed as “either/or” choices. In “Both/And” Leadership authors argue that organizational success depends on simultaneously addressing such conflicting demands, not choosing between them. Leaders need to become comfortable with multiple truths and inconsistency. They need to assume that resources are ample rather than scarce. And they need to embrace change instead of seeking stability.
The Art of Strategic Renewal
Andy Binns, Charles O’Reilly, Bruce Harreld and Michael Tushman
The enormous literature on change management focuses almost exclusively on the problem of leading change in a crisis. What do you do if there is no ‘burning platform’, but there is a compelling opportunity to pursue? In this MIT Sloane Management Review article, Change Logic’s founders describe a series of case studies, drawing on the experience of clients as well as research, where leaders made proactive pivots, rather than waiting for a performance crisis before they act.
The Ambidextrous CEO
Wendy Smith, Michael Tushman, and Andy Binns
Senior teams are a key success factor for firms that add new sources of growth to an existing core. Decisions to invest beyond the core business are often controversial and there is a strong disincentive for established business unit leaders to support them. This Harvard Business Review article uses deep research from a range of firms to unlock the secrets of how leaders manage the senior team to overcome these pressures.
Organizational Ambidexterity: IBM and the Emerging Business Opportunities
Charles O’Reilly, Bruce Harreld, and Michael Tushman
A foundational story for Change Logic, the IBM Emerging Business Opportunity program created twenty-three new businesses for the corporation between 2000 and 2010. The outcome was an engine of organic growth that outperformed all of IBM’s M&A activity for the same period. This award-winning California Management Review article explores the design of the EBOs, how they were executed, and the impact hat they had on the corporation in this period.
Organizational Ambidexterity in Action: How Managers Explore and Exploit
Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman
Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity, the ability of senior managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration of existing assets to overcome inertia and path dependence, is a core dynamic capability. Using interviews and qualitative case studies from thirteen organizations, this important California Review Management article explores the actions senior managers took to implement ambidextrous designs and identify which ones helped or hindered them in their attempts.
Change Logic works with senior executives in established firms to renew their organization and align them for growth.
Change Logic Awarded Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Award. Learn More >