The editors of the MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from Fall 2002 through Summer 2003 (Volume 44).

Summer 2004, Vol. 45, No. 4, p. 13

The Winners:

Sumantra Ghoshal
Professor, London Business School
Lynda Gratton
Professor, London Business School

Authors of:
Integrating the Enterprise

This year's winning article takes on a fundamental challenge for today's corporations: Resolving the inherent tension between the need for individual and subunit level entrepreneurship and empowerment, on the one hand, and for organizational integration and cohesion, on the other. Over the last decade, the authors note, managers in many companies focused on the entrepreneurship and empowerment side of this tension. Now that considerable progress has been made in building strong component parts, corporate attention is shifting toward the challenges of reintegrating these parts into a cohesive whole.

The authors offer a framework for developing organizational cohesiveness that, they say, requires integration at multiple levels: operational integration of the technological infrastructure; intellectual integration of the company's knowledge base; social integration through building collective bonds of performance; and emotional integration to link people to one another and to the company.

The panel of judges, comprising distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty, found the winning article to be both important and compelling. "Ghoshal and Gratton address the critically important challenge of improving the coherence and integration of today's increasingly diverse and decentralized companies without reducing their flexibility and responsiveness to their customers and their immediate environments," says Professor Eleanor Westney. "They provide both a convincing conceptual framework for understanding the challenge and specific examples of effective actions to address it." Professor Deborah Ancona adds, "The article provides a research-based, pragmatic guide to one of the most difficult challenges for today's leaders — how to balance the tension between subunit autonomy and overall enterprise integration." Professor Edgar Schein concludes, "In this article, the broad vision and detailed analysis that the authors provide make a major contribution to our understanding of how organizations can and should work."

This year's award is particularly poignant, given the recent passing of co-author Sumantra Ghoshal, a true innovator in management thinking for whom his colleagues' great admiration was exceeded only by their affection. "Though most of Ghoshal's work was in the field of strategy, his real contribution was to a better understanding of organizational dynamics in general," says Professor Schein. "Richard Beckhard would have been proud."

For more on Sumantra Ghoshal's life and work, see Remembering Sumantra Ghoshal.

Richard Beckhard One of the founders and architects of the field of organizational development, Prof. Richard Beckhard was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years. A longtime friend of the MIT Sloan Management Review, Beckhard was known for his efforts to help organizations function in a more humane and high-performing manner and to empower people to be agents of change. His books include Organizational Development Strategies and Models, Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change, Changing the Essence: The Art of Creating and Leading Fundamental Change in Organizations, and his autobiography, Agent of Change: My Life, My Practice. The prize was established in 1984 by the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Business upon Prof. Beckhard's retirement and renamed the Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize after his death on December 28, 1999.

 

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