The purpose of this paper is to prepare a summary of the Harvard Business School Case Study “How GE Teaches Teams to Lead Change” and indicate whether or not GE is successful and what lessons if any can be learned from their LIG program.

In 2007, Steven Prokesch attended the four day Leadership Innovation and Growth (LIG) program at General Electric’s leadership development center in Crotonville, New York. A year later he revisited the 19 senior managers who had attended with him to see how much influence the program had made. “The answer was plenty, “ Prokesch writes. New initiatives had been launched and businesses created. Manager’s genuinely trying to modify their roles and behavior in order to stimulate and promote growth.

Prokesch cites five main reasons for LIG’s success in bringing about those changes.

1. Team training accelerated the pace of change by giving managers an opportunity to reach consensus on the barriers to change and how best to attack them.

2. Participants were encouraged to consider both the hard barriers to change (organizational structure, capabilities, and resources) and the soft (how the members of the leadership team individually and collectively act and spend their time).

3. The traditional management challenge of balancing the short term and the long term—or simultaneously managing the present and creating the future—was explicitly addressed.

4. The course created a common vocabulary of change—“literally words that became part of daily communications inside and across GE’s businesses.”

5. No academic exercise. The program was structured so that a team would emerge with the first draft of an action plan for instituting change in its business and would feel obligated to deliver on it.

These principles, which Prokesch believes can be applied to the design of any change management program, are the subject of the