Richard Tanner Pascale : Change, agility and complexity.

Richard Tanner Pascale came to prominence in the early 1980s at the time when Peters' and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, published in 1982, was aiming to redefine the route to corporate success. His Art of Japanese Management expounding the virtues of the McKinsey Seven S model (co-authored with Anthony Athos) has become a classic, and he has remained at the forefront of management thinking ever since.

Life and career

Born in 1938, Pascale was educated at Harvard Business School. In the late 1970s, he was heavily involved in the evolution of the 7-S model developed by Peters and Waterman at McKinsey. As a member of faculty at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Pascale acted as an advisor to the White House and as a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies. More recently he became an Associate Fellow at Templeton College, Oxford.

A critic of fads, Pascale, like many of his contemporaries, does not want to be known as a `guru' or `expert'. Such labels, he believes, bring about a mindset of 'hero with all the answers', and he would rather be recognised as someone who keeps addressing questions as they occur and recur. To that end, Pascale spends a number of days every year focusing on questioning, and learning from discussions with business leaders.

Key theories

Japanese management and the 7 Ss

A spirit of enquiry brought Pascale and Athos into contact with Peters and Waterman in the late 1970s, when Waterman was driving a McKinsey initiative to seek out new models of corporate success. Peters and Waterman went on to cite American examples of success in their 1981 bestseller, while Pascale and Athos looked at lessons from Japan and how they were being applied in Corporate America. What brought the four …