The problem isn’t your strategy or your people. It’s the outdated approach to change that overlooks the importance of your team members’ heads, hearts, and hopes.
Ambitious leaders need a new playbook for implementing change—one that pays attention to the “people stuff” that leads to real results.
The most expensive problem you can have is when your top people become ROAD warriors: Retired On Active Duty.
Leaders try change-by-announcement or change-by-slogan, then wonder why nothing happens.
Cultures develop “cordial hypocrisy”—when everyone’s polite but carefully tiptoeing around the real issues.
Since founding Duncan Worldwide in 1972, Dr. Duncan has helped presidential cabinet officers, Fortune 500 CEOs, nuclear plant managers, and hundreds of others achieve what traditional change management couldn’t.
Dr. Duncan’s career began with asking powerful people tough questions as an award-winning journalist before age 25. By interviewing prominent figures in politics and business, he began to understand why there’s often a gap between what leaders promise and what they deliver.
After founding Duncan Worldwide in 1972 and then running global communications at Campbell Soup Company in his 30s, Dr. Duncan spent decades teaching leaders to close that gap. Above all, he saw that the best change happens when people feel heard, not commanded.
With AI and other technologies reshaping entire industries overnight, there’s never been a stronger correlation between a business’s profit margins and its ability to implement change. But many leaders still lack the so-called “soft skills” to make change stick.
That’s why Dr. Duncan teaches leaders to stop practicing change-by-announcement and start engaging people’s heads, hearts, and hopes. When you replace command-and-control with genuine engagement, skepticism becomes high trust, compliance becomes commitment, and the implementation belly flops become sustainable performance.
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No organization should have to accept that 70% of their change efforts will fail. No leader should have to choose between being liked and getting results. No employee should have to become Retired On Active Duty just to survive another flavor-of-the-month initiative.
The pattern can be broken. Dr. Duncan has spent decades proving it.