Leading Through Change
Bryan has lived through four corporate mergers and spent decades teaching change leadership, and he still catches his own mind running to the worst case. These posts are about moving people through change that has already started, and about the storms we imagine before we reach them.
24 articles
2026
Everything you know behind you, everything you do not ahead. Bryan Yager on standing at the shoreline of a change.
6 min readThree weeks retracing Easy Company across seven countries. Bryan Yager on standing where he had only read about.
5 min readThe best leadership lessons most of us have were not learned at work. Bryan Yager on what we learned from mom.
5 min readFour mergers and decades of teaching change, and Bryan Yager still catches his own mind running straight to the worst case.
6 min readFor MLK Day, Bryan Yager sets aside persuading and simply invites you to dream bigger and talk to someone unlike you.
5 min read2025
Around 70% of large transformations fail. Bryan Yager on the difference between change management and change leadership.
6 min readChange fatigue is real. Bryan Yager on a job nobody described: herding people through one pivot after the next.
7 min readYou cannot have different by doing the same. Bryan Yager on leading change as the job, not a special project.
7 min readLeadership is a way of thinking before it is a set of skills. Bryan Yager on the shift from me to we.
4 min readThe biggest shift a new manager makes: firefighter to fire prevention expert. Bryan Yager on the mindset change that decides it.
7 min read2020
Thirty million copies and still the fastest useful read on change. Bryan Yager on why it earns the reputation.
7 min readEveryone wanted things back to normal. Bryan Yager on why that was the wrong wish, and what should never have gone back.
4 min readDuring a merger, Bryan Yager opened every session with one question: how are you? On not getting stuck in the emotional mud.
5 min readBad leaders teach as reliably as good ones. Bryan Yager on the leadership lessons a crisis puts on public display.
5 min readWritten in the first week of the pandemic. Bryan Yager on what leaders actually do in a crisis: point people up, out, and forward.
4 min read2019
What would your department look like if it were perfect? Bryan Yager on vision, and the resentment that erodes it.
3 min read70% of transformations fail. Bryan Yager on why they are usually well managed and badly led.
4 min readBryan Yager wants "buy-in" struck from the change leader's vocabulary, and explains what has to replace it first.
3 min readBryan Yager memorized a 1980 Wall Street Journal column and kept it above his desk. On what its title really meant.
3 min read2018
"The soft stuff is the hard part." Bryan Yager on leadership teams that look inward or outward, and rarely both.
3 min readKodak had no shortage of smart people. Bryan Yager on the arithmetic that ended it, and whether your company passes it.
2 min readBryan has spent more than 45 years developing leaders, in Boise and across the country. If this is the thinking you want in the room, he works with organizations on Leadership Development Workshops, and the same thinking runs through his book, How to Transition Into Leadership.