Course: MGT 6540 — Leading Change, Mod II 2025

Instructor: Ray Friedman, Vanderbilt Owen

Anchor canon: Kotter's Leading Change; Beer & Nohria's Cracking the Code of Change; Kotter & Schlesinger's Choosing Strategies for Change; Booz Allen's Ten Guiding Principles; Sebenius & Friedman on coalitional leadership.

Anchor cases: Ron Johnson at JCPenney; Toby Johnson at Frito-Lay; Hiroshi Mikitani's Englishnization at Rakuten; Julie Roehm at Wal-Mart; HSN's CEO; DaVita; NASA Open Innovation; Michelle Rhee in DC schools; Jameson Norton at Newport Healthcare.

Worked examples: Gabriel's Buy-In Experience Assessment; the Vanderbilt Recreation Center Change Audit (Group 4, Kenny Moore as change agent, graded B+/A-); Gabriel's Final Reflection Essay — Personal Philosophy on Leading Change.

This masterclass is the long-form synthesis of MGT 6540 — a working playbook for leading change in real organizations. The course's animating premise: the "what" of change is usually clear; the "how" — how to change people and organizations — is the difficult part. Every module of this masterclass is a different angle on that "how."

The deepest insight from Gabriel's own reflection on the course, drawn directly from his Final Reflection Essay:

"Successful organizational change hinges on architects who can balance ruthless economic necessity with profound cultural investment, a philosophy embodied by Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria's simultaneous integration of Theory E and Theory O. My final assessment reveals that while my strength lies in the technical architecture of change, my primary vulnerability requires me to institutionalize humility and patience to prevent strategic insight from becoming a systemic flaw."

That sentence is the spine of the playbook: integrate the hard side and the soft side, and earn shared ownership before activation. The rest of this masterclass operationalizes it.

How to read this masterclass

Read in order the first time. The narrative arc is deliberate.

• Modules 1–3 are the canonical theory: Kotter's 8 errors, Beer & Nohria's E vs. O, Kotter & Schlesinger's 6 strategies. These are the reference frameworks every other module assumes.
• Modules 4–5 cover the human side: resistance, buy-in, and the integrative 10 Guiding Principles framework Booz Allen distilled from decades of large-scale transformation engagements.
• Module 6 treats culture change directly — DaVita as the worked example, with HSN as the contrasting "fix it" case.
• Modules 7–8 are the case library: failed transformations (Ron Johnson, Roehm) and successful or hybrid ones (Toby Johnson, Mikitani, Rhee).
• Module 9 covers what the case discussions converge on but rarely name — coalitional leadership, coaching, and the discipline of changing a person.
• Module 10 ties theory to practice through the ExperienceChange GlobalTech simulation and the Vanderbilt Rec Center Change Audit, which demonstrates the integrative methodology end-to-end.
• The Master Playbook is Gabriel's Personal Philosophy on Leading Change — the integrative diagnostic, the three-bullet reminder, and the cross-class checklist.

After the first read, the playbook is reference. Pull Module 1 when you face a change initiative starting from zero. Pull Module 4 when resistance shows up. Pull Module 5 when you need a comprehensive operating framework. Pull the Master Playbook the night before you commit to a change strategy.

How this masterclass connects to the rest of the library