Foreword This author maintains that growing organizations move through five distinguishable phases of development, each of which contains a relatively calm period of growth that ends with a management crisis. He argues, moreover, that since each phase is strongly influenced by the previous one, a management with a sense of its own organization's history can anticipate and prepare for the next developmental crisis. This article provides a prescription for appropriate management action in each of the five phases, and it shows how companies can turn organizational crises into opportunities for the future growth. Mr. Greiner is associate professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School and the author of several Harvard Business Review articles on organization development.

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Growing evidence in the executive succession literature and the business press makes clear that new CEOs often attempt to introduce strategic change upon entering their jobs. Yet strategy researchers have generally neglected to document the internal dynamics of these interventions, and many scholars remain pessimistic about the likelihood of success. This paper presents an empirical case study where a new CEO succeeds at strategic change, using an intervention approach we call 'comprehensivelcollaborative'. A set of testable propositions is inferred to explain the unfolding dynamics within this intervention approach, followed by an overall theoretical framework based on a series of phases and underlying themes involving the interplay between the CEO's actions, rational synoptic planning, and emergent political behavior. Future research needs to expand upon this beginning framework to test our propositions and evaluate other intervention approaches.

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