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April 2001, MIT Sloan research page

Leaders can turn a crisis into a springboard for organizational change, say MIT Sloan Professor John S. Carroll and co-author Sachi Hatakenaka in the spring 2001 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Waterford, Conn., proved their case. In the mid-1990s, Millstone faced bankruptcy, media and regulatory scrutiny over employee harassment and intimidation, and a “broken” corporate culture.

By 1999, Millstone had transformed itself, driven toward organizational change, write the authors, by “unprecedented regulatory fiat, third-party oversight and, above all, leaders at every level who were open to learning.”

Carroll and Hatakenaka, an MIT Sloan doctoral candidate, chronicle the company's gradual path to change and draw “lessons that can be used in all industries to improve managers' and companies' competitiveness in turbulent business environments.”

Other highlights from the issue include:

• The Power of Strategic Integration
  Robert A. Burgelman and Yves L. Doz on how multibusiness corporations can exploit the opportunities that take full advantage of their capabilities and their potential to pursue new strategies.
• Linking Actions to Profits in Strategic Decision Making
  Marc J. Epstein and Robert A. Westbrook on how the Action-Profit Linkage Model helps firms identify, measure and understand the causal links between actions and profits.
• Pathways to E-Business Leadership: Getting From Bricks to Clicks
  Leslie P. Willcocks and Robert Plant on how leading business-to-consumer corporations harness the Internet to acquire new customers and increase their market share.
• The Hidden Costs of IT Outsourcing
  Jérôme Barthélemy on how unforeseen costs can undercut anticipated benefits.
• SMR Award: Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize
  The editors announce the winners of the Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development.

To read on, please visit http://mitsloan.mit.edu/smr. Reprints of MIT SMR articles are available.

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