A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Week 25

Phase Changes as Organizations Grow and Change

Introduction

As an organization grows it can lose its vitality by focusing on the needs of those inside the organization rather than on customers. This often happens, for example, in star-driven organizations that have experienced phenomenal growth under the leadership of their entrepreneur-founder. At some point there is a need for a “phase change” in management: the founder either has to become an executive or bring in someone else to run the organization.

For example, Wilson Greatbatch, a Cornell-educated biomedical engineer at the University of Buffalo, along with several other researchers, studied the relationship between a heartbeat and electrical pulsation. Greatbatch was hoping ...