If You’re Serious About Change, You Need To Be Explicit And Focus On Shared Values

Greg Satell
7 min readMay 25, 2024
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When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.

Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.

Values are essential to culture and how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you are explicit about you values, even before you define your strategy. If not, you will pay the price later.

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Greg Satell

Co-Founder: ChangeOS | Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker, Wharton Lecturer, HBR Contributor, - Learn more at www.GregSatell.com