Stefano Mastrogiacomo

I work on how people coordinate when organisations change. My doctorate at HEC Lausanne studied the shared understanding teams need to act together. That question has followed me through leadership roles, research and consulting.

I have worked on leadership and transformation since 2002, including leading Digital Services at Pictet and managing HR programmes at Edmond de Rothschild. Today I advise executive teams on change management and strategy execution, from Geneva.

I developed the Team Alignment Map and co-authored High-Impact Tools for Teams with Alex Osterwalder. More recently, I co-founded HARVN Labs and designed the management approach of HARVN Pro.

Career and background on LinkedIn

How do capable people end up working against each other?

The question runs through my writing, from a satire of workplace behaviour to tools for making commitments and working through disagreement.

Cover of Les Seigneurs du Management, Eyrolles, 2012 — French edition
Eyrolles, 2012

Draft cover of The Lords of Management, unpublished English manuscript — English manuscript
**Unpublished**

Les Seigneurs du Management (The Lords of Management)

Eyrolles, 2012, with the collaboration of Pierre Sindelar

A satire of managers who appear cooperative while obstructing the work. Its tactics include approving budgets without allocating them and multiplying committees to avoid difficult decisions. Written in the manager’s voice, the book exposes what these behaviours do to others.

Published only in French. The English version, The Lords of Management, is an unpublished manuscript.

The book at Eyrolles

High-Impact Tools for Teams

Wiley, 2021, with Alex Osterwalder

Practical tools for making commitments explicit and working through disagreement. Foreword by Amy Edmondson. Published in more than ten languages.

Explore the book and its tools

Stefano Mastrogiacomo facilitating a workshop at the Strategyzer Bootcamp, 2016 — Working with participants at the Strategyzer Bootcamp.

Do we mean the same thing when we agree?

I have worked with more than 100 leadership and innovation teams. The tools give people a shared surface on which to make their different understandings visible.

That is where my research becomes useful: a commitment that means different things to two people, a dependency nobody has discussed, a concern that has not been heard.

Read selected engagements

Publications

High-Impact Tools for TeamsWiley, Strategyzer series. With Alex Osterwalder, foreword by Amy Edmondson
Manage the Human Side of Innovation: Tools to Help Your Team SucceedThe European Business Review
Klare Regeln für KonflikteHarvard Business Manager
Understanding IS Team Coordination in Real Time: A Process Approach to CoordinationICIS 2015, with Hazbi Avdiji and Stéphanie Missonier. Best Research-in-Progress Runner-Up
Talk Before It's Too Late: Reconsidering the Role of Conversation in Information Systems Project ManagementJournal of Management Information Systems, 31(1), with Stéphanie Missonier and Riccardo Bonazzi
Applying Psycholinguistic Concepts to IS Project Management Tool DesignECIS 2014, with Stéphanie Missonier and Hazbi Avdiji
Les Seigneurs du ManagementEyrolles. With the collaboration of Pierre Sindelar
Can a Table Regulate Participation in Top Level Managers' Meetings?ACM GROUP 2012

Interviews and podcasts: The Innovation Show, Authority Magazine, Agile Giants

“Stefano is a brilliant researcher and strategist with deep insight into the way organizations actually function.”

Dave Gray

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