First-year Columbia Business School student Kristen Peters hoped her summer internship with Taylor Reed (TR) would lead to a job offer in private wealth management. Yet mid-way through the internship, Peters received poor feedback, with TR executives citing her low energy and disregard for the firm's rules by checking her phone during classroom time. Vowing to improve her image, Peters completed extra work and extended her networking efforts. By summer's end, Peters remained unsure whether a job offer would be forthcoming. In this case students examine Peters' performance and TR's culture before discussing strategies for building influence. This two-part case series asks students to identify Peter's goals, detect office politics, and discuss how she handles the company culture. It concludes that jobs often possess both meritocratic and political components.

First-year Columbia Business School student Kristen Peters hoped her summer internship with Taylor Reed (TR) would lead to a job offer in private wealth management. Yet mid-way through the internship, Peters received poor feedback, with TR executives citing her low energy and disregard for the firm's rules by checking her phone during classroom time. Vowing to improve her image, Peters completed extra work and extended her networking efforts. By summer's end, Peters remained unsure whether a job offer would be forthcoming. In this case students examine Peters' performance and TR's culture before discussing strategies for building influence. This two-part case series asks students to identify Peter's goals, detect office politics, and discuss how she handles the company culture. It concludes that jobs often possess both meritocratic and political components.

First-year Columbia Business School student Kristen Peters hoped her summer internship with Taylor Reed (TR) would lead to a job offer in private wealth management. Yet mid-way through the internship, Peters received poor feedback, with TR executives citing her low energy and disregard for the firm's rules by checking her phone during classroom time. Vowing to improve her image, Peters completed extra work and extended her networking efforts. By summer's end, Peters remained unsure whether a job offer would be forthcoming. In this case students examine Peters' performance and TR's culture before discussing strategies for building influence. This two-part case series asks students to identify Peter's goals, detect office politics, and discuss how she handles the company culture. It concludes that jobs often possess both meritocratic and political components.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most management advice today--whether it's from books or articles, prescribed in courses or by consultants--says that change is good and more change is better. Advice on how to change varies quite a bit, but it has three features in common: "Creative destruction" is its motto. "Change or perish" is its justification. And "no pain, no change" is its rationale for overcoming a purportedly innate human resistance to change. The author admits that creative destruction may be necessary, and even preferable, in certain situations. Companies that have enjoyed captive markets, docile suppliers, and government support may need the rude awakening it provides. In such instances, organizational stability is so ingrained that creative destruction may even be the best way to achieve change with the least amount of pain. But for every change avoider today, he says, there are many more "change-aholics"--companies that have changed more aggressively, quickly, and repeatedly than any organization could hope to do successfully. In the process, they have often suffered from "more pain, less change." The author urges executives at such companies to monitor their organizations continually for symptoms of repetitive change syndrome: initiative overload, change-related chaos, employee cynicism, and burnout.

Change or perish is a corporate truism, but so is its unhappy corollary: many companies change and perish. The process of change can tear an organization apart. Drawing on his research over ten years, the author suggests that companies alternate major change initiatives with carefully paced periods of smaller, organic change, using processes he calls tinkering and kludging (kludging is tinkering on a large scale). The result is dynamic stability, which allows change without fatal pain. Citing examples from General Electric to Barnesandnoble.com, the author describes dynamic stability as a process of continual but relatively small reconfigurations of existing practices and business models rather than the creation of new ones. As they tinker and kludge, successful companies would be wise to follow these four guidelines: reward shameless borrowing; appoint a chief memory officer who can help the company avoid making the same old mistakes; tinker and kludge internally before searching for solutions externally; and hire generalists, because generalists tend to be more adept at tinkering and kludging. As a paradigm of successful pacing, the author cites the efforts of Lou Gerstner at IBM, American Express Travel Related Services, and RJR Nabisco.