Organization

A better way to lead

large-scale change
By methodically putting equal emphasis on the hard and soft
elements of leading change, organizations can more than double
their odds of success.

by Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger

© 2nix/Getty Images

July 2019
 In Beyond Performance 2.0 (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and
Bill Schaninger draw on their 40-plus years of combined experience, and on the most comprehensive re-
search effort of its kind, to provide a practical and proven “how to” guide for leading successful large-scale
change. This article, drawn from the book’s opening chapter, provides an overview of this approach and
explains why it works. Future articles will deal with specific topics, such as uncovering and shifting limiting
mind-sets during change efforts, as well as how to create the energy and ownership needed to succeed.

Neville Isdell took the helm as CEO of Coca-Cola Working teams tackled performance-related issues,
during troubled times. In his words, “These were such as the company’s new targets and objectives,
dark days. Coke was losing market share. Nothing, as well as the capabilities they would require. Other
it seemed—even thousands of layoffs—had been teams addressed organizational effectiveness: how
enough to get the company back on track.”1 Its total people could work together as a global team; how
shareholder returns stood at minus 26 percent, to improve planning, metrics, rewards, and people
while its great rival, PepsiCo, delivered a handsome development; and how once again to “live our values.”
46 percent. Isdell was clear eyed about the The manifesto was created using a collaborative
challenge ahead; as he put it, “There were so many process to ensure that the organization’s leaders
problems at Coke, a turnaround was risky at best.”2 would feel deep ownership and authorship of the
program. As Isdell explained, “The magic of the
Isdell had a clear sense of what the company manifesto is that it was written in detail by the top 150
needed: to capture the full potential of the trademark managers and had input from the top 400. Therefore,
Coca-Cola brand, develop other core brands in it was their program for implementation.”3
noncarbonated soft drinks, build wellness platforms,
and create adjacent businesses. These weren’t new Soon, the benefits of Isdell’s approach became
ideas, and Isdell’s predecessors had failed to make apparent. Within three years, shareholder value
change happen at scale. No matter which direction jumped from negative territory to a 20 percent
he set, the company couldn’t make progress until it positive return. Volume growth in units sold increased
improved its declining morale, deficient capabilities, by almost 10 percent, to 21.4 billion. Coca-Cola had
strained partnerships with bottlers, divisive politics, amassed 13 billion-dollar brands—30 percent more
and flagging performance culture. than Pepsi. Of the 16 market analysts who followed
the company, 13 rated it as outperforming.
Just a hundred days into the new role, Isdell
announced that the company would fall short of Quantifiable improvements in people-related
its meager earnings-growth target: 3 percent. measures matched these impressive performance
Later that year, Coca-Cola announced that its gains. Staff turnover at US operations fell by almost
third-quarter earnings had tanked by 24 percent. 25 percent. Employee-engagement scores jumped
However, Isdell plowed onward, launching what he so high that researchers at the external company
called “Coca-Cola’s Manifesto for Growth.” The goal that conducted the survey hailed what it called an
was to outline a path that showed not just where the “unprecedented improvement.” Employees’ views of
company aimed to go—its strategy—but also what the company’s leadership improved by 19 percent.
it would do to get there and how people would work Communication and awareness of goals rose to 76
together differently along the way. percent, from 17 percent. According to Isdell, however,

1
David Beasley and Neville Isdell, Inside Coca-Cola: A CEO’s Life Story of Building the World’s Most Popular Brand, New York, NY: St. Martin’s
Press, 2011.
2
Ibid.
3
Adrienne Fox, “Refreshing a beverage company’s culture,” HR Magazine, November 1, 2007, shrm.org.

2 A better way to lead large-scale change

 the biggest change was qualitative. Three years into been “mostly” or “completely” successful. This was
the role, Isdell noted that “when I first arrived, about consistent with findings from previous research
80 percent of the people would cast their eyes to that we had conducted and others in the field had
the ground. Now, I would say it’s about 10 percent. reported.7 By 2015, we felt enough time had passed
Employees are engaged.”4 When he retired as CEO, to test how well the five-frames approach worked. A
he handed over a healthy, well-performing company. global survey of 1,713 executives who had taken part
in at least one large-scale change program during the
Isdell explained the turnaround’s success by pointing previous five years showed that 79 percent of those
out that he had “taken the ‘how’ as seriously as the organizations fully implementing the five-frames
‘what.’”5 Another way to explain it is that he put equal methodology reported success.
emphasis on the hard and the soft stuff: performance
and health. Performance is what an enterprise
does to deliver improved financial and operational The value of health
results for its stakeholders. Companies evaluate Quotes about the importance of organizational
their performance through financial and operational health could fill a whole article, if not a whole
metrics such as net operating profit, returns on book. Yet many leaders think that however well
capital employed, total shareholder returns, net this wisdom works elsewhere, it won’t for their
operating costs, and stock turn (and the relevant companies. Still others argue that they must improve
equivalents in not-for-profit and service industries). performance first or that the people-oriented
By contrast, health describes how effectively aspects of change don’t have a proven return on
people work together to pursue a common goal. It investment. Our research, over many years, has
is evaluated by an organization’s levels of internal therefore focused on determining—through hard
alignment, quality of execution, and capacity to facts—how much value organizational health
renew itself to sustain high performance in an ever- creates. When we wrote Beyond Performance, we
changing external environment. To deliver successful had accumulated 600,000 data points across 500
change at scale, leaders should emphasize organizations from our Organizational Health Index
performance- and health-related efforts equally. survey tool since its development in 2002, which
meant that we had the data required to answer the
How do we know? In 2010, we wrote Beyond question once and for all.
Performance,6 which laid out a methodology we
called the “five frames of performance and health,” When we tested for correlations between
a change-leadership approach that emphasized performance and health on a broad range of
performance and health equally. The book included business metrics, we found a strong positive one
the finding (from our 2010 survey of 2,314 global in every case. Companies in the top quartile of
business executives) that only a third of those who organizational health were 2.2 times more likely than
had experienced a large-scale change program lower-quartile companies to have above-median
during the previous five years reported that it had EBITDA8 margins, twice as likely to have above-

4
Ibid.
5
Personal interview.
6
Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, Hoboken, NY: John Wiley &
Sons, 2011.
7
A sample of the reporting on the 30 percent odds includes James Champy and Michael Hammer, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto
for Business Transformation, New York, NY: Harper Business, 1993: “50 percent to 70 percent of the organizations … do not achieve the
dramatic results they intended”; John P. Kotter, Leading Change, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1996: “More than 70 percent of
needed change either fails to be launched … [or] to be completed”; Martin E. Smith, “Success rates for different types of organizational change,”
Performance Improvement, January 2002, Volume 41, Issue 1, pp. 26–33, onlinelibrary.wiley.com: in a review of 49 studies that encompassed
a sample size of more than 40,000 respondents, 33 percent of change programs succeed; a 2006 McKinsey Quarterly survey of 1,536 global
business executives: “30 percent were ‘mostly’ or ‘completely’ successful” in improving and sustaining performance; John P. Kotter, A Sense of
Urgency, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008: “the same appalling 70 percent figure” for change failure; and a 2008 McKinsey Quarterly
survey of 3,199 global business executives: “Only a third say their organizations succeeded.”
8
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

A better way to lead large-scale change 3

 median growth in enterprise value to book value, The correlation between health and performance
and 1.5 times more likely to have above-median doesn’t necessarily mean that the relationship is
growth in net income to sales. causal. Education and income are highly correlated,
for example, but it is just as logical to argue that a
Now, almost ten years later, with more than five higher income creates opportunities for a higher
million data points across 2,000 organizations, education as that a higher education creates
the analytics tell the same story. Companies in opportunities for a higher income. This is why we
the top quartile of organizational health had total haven’t rested our case on correlations alone.
shareholder returns three times greater than We’ve also tested the relationship over time. First,
bottom-quartile companies, and their returns on we looked at regression coefficients between
invested capital were two times higher (Exhibit 1). comparable units within organizations—for example,
Companies in the bottom quartile for health didn’t
Article type and Year the performance and health of branches in bank
Article Title experience any growth in sales; top-quartile ones networks, hospitals in healthcare networks, stores
Exhibit X of X averaged 24 percent sales growth.9 in retail networks, and oil refineries in oil companies

Exhibit 1
Top-quartile companies for organizational health have far better shareholder returns and
returns on invested capital than bottom-quartile companies.
Total shareholder returns1 Return on invested capital2

35

2.5× 26
25

3.0×

14 14

Bottom Mid3 Top Bottom Mid3 Top

1
8-year average used to exclude volatility from 2007–08 global financial crisis.
2
Average 3-year financial indicators of companies in respective quartiles.
3
2nd and 3rd quartiles.

9
McKinsey Organizational Health Index Survey, December 2016.

4 A better way to lead large-scale change

 (Exhibit 2). We’ve found, in every case, that health of the wider organization across a range of criteria,
explains more than 50 percent of the variation in including net profit before taxes, branch-staff
performance across locations. characteristics, and customer economics (average
income per customer in retail banking and industry
We’ve also tested causality by conducting composition in business banking). Over an 18-month
extensive research comparing experimental period, each experimental group pursued a sales-
and control groups over multiyear time frames. stimulation program, one using a more traditional,
One group embarked on change in a traditional, performance-heavy approach, the other emphasizing
relatively performance-oriented way, the other performance and health equally. During the trial, we
used our five-frames approach. After running took care to minimize distortions (corporate initiatives
five longitudinal tests in industries as diverse as such as operational restructuring, leadership
telecommunications, mining, financial services, changes, and significant staff turnover) that might
and retailing, we found that the experimental disproportionately affect any one group.
groups applying the balanced performance-and-
health approach delivered results that, on average, The results of the study were compelling. In business
were 1.8 times higher than those of groups using banking, the traditional approach generated 8
the traditional one (Exhibit 3). percent more value than the control group did, but
the performance-and-health approach generated
For example, at a large financial-services institution, 19 percent more value than the control group. In
print 2019 we studied two experimental groups and a control retail banking, the respective figures were 7 and
group, which were comparable and representative 12 percent. With findings like these across multiple
LargeScaleChange
Exhibit 2 of 4

Exhibit 2
Organizational health explains more than 50 percent of the performance variations across
locations in networks.
Example: Refineries at an oil company, HIGH Unit
$ per unit produced r2 = 0.54

Performance

LOW Health HIGH

Note: r2 is the proportion or percentage of variance explained by a regression.

A better way to lead large-scale change 5

 industries, we felt that the case for causation was Sunbeam, he sold two-thirds of its plants and fired
well and truly closed. This proof that health is a half of its 12,000 employees. Ironically, the stock
significant causal driver of performance is great price of Sunbeam then rose so high that he couldn’t
news for leaders. Unlike many factors that affect sell it quickly. Having compromised its health,
performance—changes in customer behavior, Dunlap now needed to sustain its performance for
competitors’ moves, government actions—your the foreseeable future. But the damage was too
organization’s health is something you can control. great. Two years later, the company faced quarterly
losses as high as $60 million, and Dunlap was fired.

The perils of performance By contrast, when Louis Gerstner became CEO of

Emphasizing performance and health equally isn’t IBM, he decided—in the face of pressure from Wall
simple. When your company requires large-scale Street—not to focus exclusively on improving its
change, for example, spending time on health may performance but instead to devote considerable
seem counterintuitive. In fact, companies can and effort and resources to lifting its health as well.
often do make short-term gains without improving Under Gerstner, the company strived to act as
their health, but these are unlikely to last. “one IBM” across its businesses: it became more
externally oriented and less arrogant, trimmed its
Perhaps the starkest example of the perils of bureaucracy, and adopted a continuous-learning
pursuing performance at the expense of health mind-set. By the time Gerstner retired, nine
is the story of Albert J. Dunlap—“Chainsaw Al”— years later, IBM’s stock had increased in value by
famous for taking over struggling companies, 800 percent, and the company had regained its
print 2019 ruthlessly downsizing them, and selling them at a leadership in parts of the computer, technology, and
LargeScaleChange
profit. When he took over the US appliance-maker IT-consulting sectors.
Exhibit 3 of 4

Exhibit 3
Groups applying the balanced performance-and-health approach had results far higher than
those of groups using the traditional one.
Comparison of traditional and experimental change efforts over an 18- to 24-month period,
% improvement

Group using traditional change methods 65

Group using balanced performance-and-health approach

51

34 35

25
19
15
12
7 8

Retail bank, Business bank, Coal mine, Retailer, Telecommunications

profit per profit per increase sales-to- call center,
retail banker business banker in tonnage labor ratio customer-churn
reduction

6 A better way to lead large-scale change

 Gerstner was courageous to work on IBM’s culture unusual: “Our development team doesn’t look for
despite the threat that the company would fail. Yet, stories. Their job is to create teams of people that
perversely, the greatest obstacle to emphasizing work well together.”10
health in an appropriate way isn’t an urgent
performance imperative but rather its absence. That isn’t the company’s only distinctive feature. An
When organizations are thriving financially, a average Hollywood studio produces six to 12 films
certain complacency may set in, so that their health a year. Pixar produces just one—a risky bet, since
declines. That in turn leads, in the least-bad case, toan animated film costs about $180 million to make.
a slow decline in performance and, in the worst, to “We have realized that having lower standards for
an existential crisis. something is bad for your soul,” Catmull explained.
Taking the right risks and accepting the reality
Consider the cautionary tale of Atari. Founded in 1972 that bold, innovative ideas demand a tolerance for
to develop electronic games, which were then just a uncertainty are central to the culture. As Catmull
figment of a designer’s imagination, the company sold says, “Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to
$40 million worth of them and earned profits of $3 prevent risk but to build the capability to recover
million in 1973. Not long afterward, deep-pocketed when failures occur.”11
owners who invested heavily in R&D bought Atari. By
1980, it had posted revenues of $415 million and was Pixar focused on health to build a strong
hailed as the fastest-growing business in US history. organization from the start. Other companies have
learned over time the importance of pursuing
Yet Atari soon began to crumble from inside: performance and health in equal measure. In 2009,
teamwork declined, communication broke down, a for instance, General Motors (GM)—once the world’s
risk-avoidance culture set in, investment in R&D fell, dominant carmaker—filed for bankruptcy and
and the quality of products was sacrificed to push accepted a $50 billion US government bailout. The
them into the market more quickly. The result was company then underwent an 18-month turnaround
some of the biggest duds in video-gaming history. that enabled it to pay back a significant portion
Alienated engineers departed, many to found or join of that money and to reenter the stock market in
rival companies. By 1983, Atari had lost $536 million 2010. Many observers suggested that GM was on
and resorted to massive layoffs. It never recovered. track, but though performance was on the upswing,
The shell of the company—little more than a brand underlying health issues remained.
name—was sold in 1998 for only $5 million. Atari
was so focused on performance that it was unaware Soon enough, in 2014, the devastating ignition-
of its deteriorating health. switch problems of GM cars left at least 124 people
dead and 275 injured. An internal investigation
By way of contrast, consider the case of Pixar, attributed this disaster to organizational-health-
the computer-generated-animation studio. Pixar related factors.12 Mary Barra, who took over as CEO
has 15 offerings that rank among the 50 highest- in 2014, vowed to improve not only the company’s
grossing animated films, and it has earned 19 performance but also its health by focusing
Academy Awards, eight Golden Globes, and 11 on accountability, teamwork, results, candor,
Grammys. Its president, Ed Catmull, who had transparency, and customers.13 Her efforts seem
no business experience before cofounding the to be paying off, with three profitable years and a
company, says that its development process is strong balance sheet. As GM’s experience shows,

10
Mel Cowan, “Pixar co-founder mulls meaning of success,” USC News, December 10, 2009, news.usc.edu.
11
Ed Catmull, “How Pixar fosters collective creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2008, hbr.com.
12
Rick Tetzeli, “Mary Barra is remaking GM’s culture—and the company itself,” Fast Company, October 17, 2016, fastcompany.com.
13
Ibid.

A better way to lead large-scale change 7

 when organizations tend to their health, it really —— Bankable plan (architect). Define the portfolio
does improve—and so does performance. of initiatives that will realize your strategic
objectives and meet your skill requirements;
then sequence your actions and reallocate
The five frames of performance and resources accordingly.
health
How can change leaders emphasize performance —— Ownership model (act). Establish strong
and health equally in practice? There are no governance, decide how to scale your
simple guiding principles or rules of thumb—if change initiatives, monitor their progress,
there were, success rates would no doubt be and dynamically adjust them throughout
much higher than 30 percent. However, we implementation.
can offer a structured, careful, and proven
methodology that has now been battle tested —— Learning infrastructure (advance). Institutionalize
and further refined for almost ten years: the five processes and expertise so that the organization
frames of performance and health. shares knowledge, constantly improves, and
continually learns how to do new things.
This approach divides the overall change journey
into smaller, more manageable stages. Each stage Here are the five frameworks for health:
has a basic question companies must answer
through their work at that point in the journey. It’s —— Health goals (aspire). Objectively check
easy to know when to advance from one stage to the your organization’s health, choose where to
next—if you have the answer, move forward. These be exceptional, and target areas that need
five stages are collectively called the “5As”: immediate improvement.

—— Aspire. Where do we want to go? —— Mind-set shifts (assess). Pinpoint helping and
hindering behaviors for priority health areas,
—— Assess. How ready are we to go there? explore the underlying mind-set drivers, and
prioritize a critical few “from–to” mind-set shifts.
—— Architect. What must we do to get there?
—— Influence levers (architect). Use four levers to
—— Act. How do we manage the journey? reshape the work environment: role modeling,
understanding and conviction, reinforcement
—— Advance. How do we continue to improve? mechanisms, and confidence-building efforts.
Then ensure that performance initiatives are
For each of these five stages, we offer explicit, engineered to promote the necessary mind-set
practical guidance for addressing performance and behavioral shifts.
and health. It takes the form of five frameworks for
performance (one for each stage) and five for health —— Generation of energy (act). Mobilize influence
(ditto). These are the frameworks for performance: leaders, make the change personal for
employees, and maintain high-impact, two-way
—— Strategic objectives (aspire). Create a communication.
compelling long-term change vision, set midterm
aspirations along the path, and guard against —— Leadership placement (advance). Prioritize
biases in the process. ongoing roles by their potential to create value,
match the most important ones to the best
—— Skill-set requirements (assess). Forecast talent, and make the talent-match process
demand for skills and understand their supply business as usual.
dynamics; then decide how to close gaps.

8 A better way to lead large-scale change

LargeScaleChange
Exhibit 4 of 4

Exhibit 4
The performance-and-health methodology is a proven approach to leading large-scale change.
Performance Health

1. Aspire – Create a compelling long-term – Check health

Where do we vision – Choose where to be exceptional
Strategic Health
want to go? – Roll back to midterm aspirations – Target broken practices
objectives goals
– Guard against biases

Masterstroke:
Involve a broad coalition

2. Assess – Forecast skill demand – Identify helping and hindering

How ready – Understand skill-supply dynamics Skill-set behaviors
Mind-set
are we to go – Determine how to close gaps require- – Uncover underlying mind-set
shifts
there? ments drivers
– Reframe root-cause mind-sets

Masterstroke:
Balance your inquiry

3. Architect – Define portfolio of initiatives – Determine how to reshape work

What must – Programmatically sequence activity environment
Bankable Influence
we do to get – Reallocate resources – Hardwire health into performance
plan levers
there? – Interactively cascade change story

Masterstroke:
Appeal to multiple sources of meaning

4. Act – Establish strong governance – Mobilize influence leaders

How do we – Choose scale-up methods – Make things personal for a critical
Ownership
manage the – Monitor progress and dynamically mass
and energy
journey? adjust – Maintain high-impact, 2-way
communication

Masterstroke:
Motivate through social contracts

5. Advance – Embed knowledge sharing – Prioritize roles by value

Learning
How do we – Institutionalize improvement processes – Match talent to priority roles
and
continue to – Facilitate continuous learning – Operationalize process
leader-
improve?
ship

Masterstroke:
Ensure fair process

A better way to lead large-scale change 9

 The advance stage prepares the way for another Mastering irrationality
five-frames cycle, starting once again with aspire. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist and Santa Fe
This approach helps organizations to drive multiple Institute cofounder Murray Gell-Mann once asked
S-curves of change: an intensive period of activity people to consider “how hard physics would be if
and radical improvement, followed by a period particles could think.”14 The “particles” in the physics
of consolidation and incremental improvement, of change—employees—can not only think but often
eventually followed by another ramp-up in intensity, do so in seemingly irrational ways. As the change
and so on. If both performance and health improve journey unfolds, smart leaders must therefore
during each cycle, the organization over time “learns understand the social science of “predictable
to learn” and changes continually. irrationality.”15 When people are in a hurry to park,
for example, how many circle around a parking lot
To apply this approach, it’s important to understand to find the most convenient space when it would be
how the elements work together horizontally and much quicker to take the first one they see? Why
vertically. Let’s start with the horizontal elements. take home pencils from the office without guilt if the
idea of raiding the petty cash to buy pencils would
In practice, the performance and health elements of shock you? As these examples show, we are all
each stage are far more integrated than the previous susceptible to irrationality in decision making.
discussion implies. Early on (for example, in the
aspire stage), the work related to each element of The social, cognitive, and emotional biases that
performance and health is relatively self-contained. promote seemingly irrational decisions are well
Later, as the work moves from planning to action, understood by the field of behavioral economics.
efforts to boost performance increasingly reinforce That isn’t true for change management and
health, and vice versa. By the act stage, employees organizational leadership, but it should be. In each
experience a single, integrated change program— stage of the 5A process, leaders ought to consider
the distinction between performance and health is important lessons about human irrationality and
semantics. Unfortunately, however, some leaders how to work with it constructively. We call this part
grasp the concepts of performance and health but of the effort the change leader’s “masterstrokes”:
not the need for integrated activity to promote them. building buy-in by involving the people who will
They therefore tell their business heads to “do the execute a solution in its development; paying as
performance stuff” and HR to “do the health stuff.” much attention to what’s going well (and trying to
That approach is doomed to fail. get more of that) as to finding and fixing problems;
thoughtfully describing the “why?” of change to tap
Now let’s consider the vertical relationship between into five sources of motivation; signaling a long-term,
the elements of performance and health. Although reciprocal relationship with employees rather than
we lay out the 5A change process in a linear way, a transactional one; and putting equal effort into
from aspire to advance, in practice it must be ensuring a fair process and a fair outcome.
applied far more dynamically. In the assess stage,
for example, an organization may discover that Exhibit 4 shows the specific steps within each of the
its readiness to change is so doubtful that the five frames of performance and health, as well as
aspiration it set earlier isn’t realistic. If so, the next the relevant masterstrokes.
step is to move backward. That must also happen
if new discoveries or unexpected events in the act Many workplaces are characterized by competing
stage invalidate assumptions in the architect stage. agendas and conflict (no alignment on direction), by

14
George Johnson, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.
15
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

10 A better way to lead large-scale change

politics and bureaucracy (low quality of execution), creativity and innovation (through a sense of
and by the corrosive idea that work is “just a job” (a renewal). To paraphrase motivational speaker Joel
low sense of renewal). These aren’t just unhealthy for Barker’s riff on the aforementioned Japanese
companies that want to deliver sustainable bottom- proverb, healthy organizations connect vision with
line results—they are unhealthy for the human soul. action to change the world.
As the Japanese proverb goes, “Vision without action
is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” In this way, putting equal emphasis on the
performance and health elements of leading
Healthy organizations, by contrast, unleash organizational change doesn’t just improve the
our potential and uplift our spirit. They inspire odds of success; it improves the lives of employees,
(aligning on a big, important goal), create a sense builds an organization’s resilience, and creates a
of belonging (executing as one team), and foster pro-change mind-set.

Scott Keller is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Southern California office, and Bill Schaninger is a senior partner in the
Philadelphia office.

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Copyright © 2019 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

A better way to lead large-scale change 11