Karen Ladany

THIS WEEK’S READ We are asking people to change faster than they have the capacity to adapt. Research conducted by The Grossman Group and The Harris Poll, recently featured in an article from MIT Sloan Management Review, found that 83% of business leaders are experiencing more major change than ever before. The same research found that employees can realistically absorb only one or two major changes per year, while executives are planning three or four. For context, a major change is one that...

If we want a bigger result, we need a bigger effort. If the problem is serious, the solution must be substantial. If nothing moved, we did not push hard enough. These three assumptions are so common in workplaces that they are rarely second-guessed. They are also the reason a great deal of organizational effort produces very little change. Complex organizations do not follow normal cause-and-effect. This quarter's problem often started months ago in a decision no one connects to it now. The...

THIS WEEK'S READ A 2026 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior analyzed six decades of research on workplace stress, bringing together 515 studies and nearly 788,000 workers. Researchers compared three common sources of role stress: having too much work, receiving conflicting demands, and not clearly understanding what is expected of you. The surprising finding was that role ambiguity, or not knowing what is expected of you, was generally the most damaging of the three....