Last week, I started a six part series of blog posts called Practical Leadership Insights about Leading during a Transition. This series is focused on presenting real-world ideas and tools to leaders operating in the VUCA world of the “new normal.” It has provided tips and thoughts on how to understand and execute business strategy through people when a business ecosystem is in transition.  I discussed how I believe this is different than Change Management because Change Management is an evolving process that teaches leaders to build resilience to forces outside of the organization, whereas transition is a finite event that is controllable and usually initiated as a logical business decision. 

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Supercool, SuperSaas, and Going to Jail

The interconnected business ecosystem worlds of venture capital, cloud computing, software as a service (Saas), and Human Capital Management (HCM) were shocked last week when Zenefits – one of the hottest and fastest growing companies on the planet – made an unprecedented business announcements that caused the rocket ship to crash back to earth.

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Leadership is really hard even when things are going great.  It’s even harder when things are not going so great.  And unfortunately it is inevitable that there will be a technological disruption, a downturn in the economy, a natural disaster or something else unexpected.  Great leaders lead through the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly.

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The end of a business year is always an interesting and stressful time for those in a business leadership role. They are trying to simultaneously manage the numbers, shareholder expectations, and close the year strong... with an eye on a fast start for the following year. During the last few weeks of December, we typically see;

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This has been one of the busiest business years in a long time for mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, and other variations of the above such as the merger-inversion-for-tax reasons, and the merger-triple-spin-off move.  At Advantexe, where we provide organizations with the power of practice through the use of business simulation, we have conducted many different transformational learning engagements over the years that have focused on building the skills of leaders and contributors during the transition and process of merging, spinning off, or both.  Most of these learning engagements have included business and leadership simulation exercises to help develop and practice the skills needed to survive and then thrive after the process.  This blog shares some of the observations, insights, and data that we have gathered from these engagements to provide quick tips and thoughts if you are leading or participating in a merger, spin-off, or some combination.

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