Leadership is synonymous with change, but most of the playbook is written for change that leaders choose to initiate. What about change that is forced on the organization from the outside? Drawing on Baumgartner and Jones's Punctuated Equilibrium theory, Woodward and Hendry's coping framework, Thurlow and Mills on sense-making, and Frederic Nortier's distinction between change and transition, this article offers a checklist for leaders navigating disruption they did not ask f

Failing to plan is planning to fail, or so the saying goes. Then how do successful leaders so often skip the formal business plan? A study of nearly 400 entrepreneurs by Honig and Karlsson in the Journal of Management found the forces pushing leaders to write plans are coercion and mimicry, and that writing one produces no reliable profitability advantage. The real job of a business plan is not to predict the future. It is to give a team shared context to improvise together.