Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea

Leaders are often called upon to pitch ideas to senior management about how to change the way their company does business. Perhaps you have proposed an improvement to an existing process, a new product, a technological tool, or a way to break into a different market entirely—with mixed results. In this conversation, Sue Ashford, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and Ellen Bailey, former vice president of business and culture transformation at Harvard Business Publishing, give suggestions for framing those ideas so that executives buy into them, including the research findings they keep in mind, questions they ask themselves and others when vetting an idea, and what they learned from the times they fell short.