The Academy of Management Annual Meeting (AOM 2026) brought together some of the brightest minds in organizational science. Listening deeply to conversations around AI, leadership, and hybrid work revealed a single common thread running through them all - even when described in entirely different terms. I went to Philadelphia with an open question that has driven my work for years: Is my research on Perceived Organizational Publicness a practical framework that truly serves leaders on the...

Every year I meet managers who've completed a high-end leadership development program — three days offsite, a great facilitator, personal feedback — and six months later, when I ask what changed, they look at me with the same expression. Not shame. Not anger. Something closer to bewilderment. 'I came back different. The organization didn't.' This isn't a failure of the manager or the program. It's the failure of a question nobody asked — not even Google's Project Oxygen.

How do we actually measure the effectiveness of organizational development? Not the number of workshops. Not satisfaction with the training. The real question is something else entirely. Has something in the organization actually changed? Do managers make decisions differently? Do teams collaborate more effectively? Is the organization better able to deal with complexity? The answer, as we will soon see, is closely related to the way organizational change actually unfolds.