Perry Keenan: Changing Change Management
Perry Keenan is a senior partner and managing director in BCG's Chicago office. He is a member of the senior leadership teams for the firm's Operations and Organization practice areas and is the global leader for the change management topic.
Perry has been a BCG Fellow since 2011, and his research topic is changing change management.
Popular statistics show that the significant majority of major change programs fail. Anecdotal evidence holds that these odds have not improved in the last 20 years, despite the efforts of a literal "change management industry." (More than 13,000 publications on change management are available on Amazon alone.)
Based on the outcomes and experiences of major-industry change programs, Perry is exploring the factors that materially and systematically improve these odds—and, in fact, flip them in favor of success. This approach will extensively leverage quantitative disciplines and be supported by a set of practically impactful tactics and tools. Perry is aiming to foster an ongoing industry dialogue on this approach and the effective baselining of outcomes.
Since joining BCG in the Auckland office in 1988, Perry has led a wide range of operational redesign, enterprise program management, and change management efforts across a range of large transformation, postmerger integration, and profit-improvement projects—particularly in the Asia-Pacific and Americas regions.
Perry has coauthored several influential Harvard Business Review publications, including “The Hard Side of Change Management,” “Lead Change Successfully,” and “Leadership and the Future: The Art of Change Management."
Perry holds a BSc in mathematics and an ME in mechanical engineering from the University of Auckland, and he is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Program for Management Development. Additionally, he is a chartered professional engineer, a fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Before BCG, Perry worked as a manufacturing engineer.