MGSM Professor and DBA graduate published in the Harvard Business Review
Macquarie Graduate School of Management’s Professor Richard Badham and DBA graduate Dr Peter Fuda are featured in November’s Harvard Business Review. They are the first Australian business practitioner and academic to co-author an article on leadership transformation for the prestigious journal.
The article, entitled ‘Fire, Snowball, Mask, Movie: How Leaders Spark And Sustain Change’ is a result of an in-depth study conducted by Dr Fuda and supervised by Professor Badham into the success stories of seven Australian CEOs and how they transformed themselves, their leadership team and their organisations. The study captured their stories through a series of lengthy interviews and rigorous linguistic analysis, which uncovered the key similarities in the challenges faced and the strategies used by the seven CEOs.
These seven themes were then allocated metaphors; four are covered in the Harvard Business Review article, including Fire (ambition), Snowball (accountability), Mask (authenticity) and Movie (self-reflection). The other three metaphors are Russian Dolls, Chef and Coach.
Graduate, Dr Peter Fuda, is the Founder and Principal of The Alignment Partnership (TAP), a management consulting firm. Over the past decade, TAP has created some 30 cases of business transformation, 500 cases of individual leader transformation, and Peter has personally coached more than 200 CEOs to measurably increase their effectiveness and performance.
Professor Richard Badham, previously the BHP Foundation Professor of Management at the University of Wollongong, and the author of over 100 articles and books on innovation, leadership and cultural change said: “A practitioner and academic was the perfect match for this research. Through Peter’s highly successful consultancy work, he was able to access some of Australia’s most influential and successful transformational CEOs. Our research work at the MGSM on storytelling and metaphor in leadership development was used to help extract key themes in how leaders achieve personal and organisational transformation. It was also used to help present the findings to practitioner as well as academic audiences.’
The Harvard Business Review article is accompanied by short videos on the research, and is supplemented by a Harvard Business blog. The introduction to the article and accompanying 'Fire' and CEO video clips can be found on the HBR website
The associated Harvard Business blog is set up and running, and you are strongly encouraged to contribute to the discussion. More information, including video clips from the forthcoming documentary based on the CEOs and their experiences, can be found at www.tap.net.au/tap-hbr.html