Sloan Management Review Announces Beckhard Winners

The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review announced that Hamid Bouchikhi and John R. Kimberly are the winners of the 2014 Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the authors of the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development published from fall 2012 to summer 2013.

Richard Beckhard was one of the founders and architects of the field of organizational development. He was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years. A longtime friend of MIT Sloan Management Review, Beckhard was known for his efforts to help organizations function in a more humane and high-performing manner and to empower people to be agents of change.

The prize was awarded for the article titled “Making Mergers Work” from the Fall 2012 issue. Hamid Bouchikhi is a professor of management and entrepreneurship at ESSEC Business School in Cergy-Pontoise, France. John R. Kimberly is the Henry Bower Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In the prize-winning article, the authors examine why mergers and acquisitions so often fail to achieve the results and synergies they promise. They argue that much of the difficulty lies in the failure of executives of the acquiring company to seriously consider the quite different ways that not only operational but also psychological integration between previously separate corporate entities can be achieved.

This year’s panel of judges consisted of distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty: Schussel Family Professor and chairman of the MIT Sloan Management Review managing board Erik Brynjolfsson, retired senior lecturer Cyrus Gibson and Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management John Van Maanen.

regions: Boston

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