About Us
Making This a Better World to Work In
We develop leaders, guide organizations through change, and build High-Performance Organizations that bring out the best in people and achieve outstanding results.
Imagine a world where leaders:
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Motivate and empower people to achieve excellence
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Develop workplace cultures that bring out the best in people
That’s the world we’re building — one organization at a time.
Who We Are
CulturalChange is a consulting company specializing in leadership development, organizational change, and high performance.
Since 1991, we’ve partnered with corporations worldwide to:
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Improve leadership effectiveness
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Create winning cultures
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Build High-Performance Organizations
Our proven systems, BlueLeader™ and Pulscipline™, provide leaders with the methodology, coaching, and skills to achieve lasting results.
Our Story
CulturalChange was founded in 1991 on a simple idea: when organizations create workplace cultures that bring out the best in people, employees provide the discretionary performance needed for high performance and outstanding results.
From the start, we focused on what many consulting firms overlooked. Leadership and culture are not “soft” concepts. They are the foundation of high performance. We broke them down into simple, practical models that are easy to learn and apply. We call “putting a handle on it.” These models became training modules that develop the mindset and skills for lasting leadership effectiveness, and the basis of a change management system for building High-Performance Organizations.
We developed two proven systems that remain at the heart of everything we do today:
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BlueLeader™ Model: for developing leaders who can motivate and empower people to achieve excellence, and create workplace cultures that bring out the best in people
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Pulscipline™ Change Management System: for guiding organizations through change and building High-Performance Organizations
Over the years, we have:
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Trained more than 20,000 leaders
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Guided 30+ corporations through change (100% success rate)
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Built 30+ High-Performance Organizations
Our network of senior consultants enables us to deliver projects worldwide, across industries and cultures.
At the heart of our work is one belief: people matter. When organizations treat people the right way, employees provide the discretionary performance that make results once thought impossible a reality. We develop leaders who can turn that belief into results.
Together, let’s Make This a Better World to Work In.
Our Network of Consultants
Leaders Who Have Lived Transformation
Our network of senior consultants is unique. Every consultant in the CulturalChange Network has lived through a major transformation as a client before joining us. They know what it takes to lead change because they have done it successfully in their own organizations.
Experienced Partners, Not Employees
They now want to share what they have experienced with other leaders and organizations. They are not employees of CulturalChange. Most have their own companies and partner with us to bring their specific experience, credibility, and leadership insight to complex organizational transformations.
How We Work With Organizations
Each change project brings together a core team of three consultants who work alongside the organization’s leadership team. We guide and coach leaders through every phase of the transformation by developing their competence, providing short-term action plans (PulseStrategies), and offering one-to-one coaching for directors and top leaders every six weeks.
How Many Consultants Per Change Project?
During one of our early discussions with a client, a CEO asked, “How many people do you use to implement the change?”
We asked, “How many leaders do you have?”
He answered, “160.”
We replied, “Then we will use 163 people to implement the change.”
Our philosophy is clear. We do not change the organization, your leaders do. A small group of consultants empower, coach, and guide your leaders to lead their functions, departments, and teams through the change.
Global Collaboration for Lasting Results
This collaborative model allows us to deliver large-scale transformations worldwide while keeping every project personal, practical, and client-driven. Through the CulturalChange Network, we combine deep experience with our proven BlueLeader™ and Pulscipline™ systems to develop High-Performance Leaders, create winning cultures, and build High-Performance Organizations.
Commitment to Our Clients
Strive for Excellence
We seek excellence in our delivery and strive to set an example in everything we do.
Offer Practical Solutions
We are committed to providing simple and practical models and methods that are easy to implement.
Exceed Expectations
We deliver excellent results and take pride in exceeding our customers expectations.
Set the Standard
We are committed to delivering state-of- the-art services and continuously setting new standards of excellence in our field.
We Guarantee Our Work
We are so confident in the quality of our training programs and consulting services that we offer a satisfaction guarantee; if for any reason a customer is not satisfied with a service we delivered, we will not invoice that service.
Meet Our Founder
A Lifelong Commitment to Leadership and Culture
Jacques Fischer is the founder and CEO of CulturalChange. Since 1991, he has dedicated his career to developing leaders and helping organizations build cultures that bring out the best in people and achieve outstanding results.
Seeing What Others Overlooked
Early in his career, Jacques saw what many organizations overlooked: when an organization creates a workplace culture that brings out the best in people, employees provide the extra effort needed to achieve outstanding results. It is a win-win-win situation. He also recognized that the quality of a workplace culture and the effectiveness of its leaders are inseparable. Organizations need excellent leaders who can motivate and empower people and create workplace cultures in which people thrive.
A Mission That Started at 26
At the age of 26, Jacques set out on a mission to Make This a Better World to Work In. To achieve it, he focuses on two things: developing leaders who can motivate and empower people to achieve excellence, and helping organizations strengthen their leadership, evolve their cultures, and improve performance to build High-Performance Organizations that bring out the best in people and achieve outstanding results.
A Legacy of Impact
His research and consulting work led to the creation of two proven systems that now define CulturalChange:
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BlueLeader™ Model – for developing High-Performance Leaders and Organizations
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Pulscipline™ Change Management System – for guiding organizations through change
Over the past three decades, Jacques has trained more than 20,000 leaders, guided 30+ corporations through change, and built more than 30 High-Performance Organizations.
Today, he continues to develop High-Performance Leaders and Organizations in his quest to Make This a Better World to Work In.
Our History
We didn’t set out to create systems. We set out to develop effective leaders, and along the way, we discovered how to implement large-scale change initiatives and build High-Performance Organizations.
Every system we use today was born from real change projects, from what worked, what failed, and what leaders needed to succeed.
Here’s our history.
Combining Management & Motivation Techniques
Jacques Fischer began his career as a production manager at Procter & Gamble, where he combined the Total Quality Management principles of Dr. Edwards Deming with the motivational techniques he learned from athletics and from selling books door to door. The leadership method he developed helped him break and continually set new global production records at P&G. But what struck Jacques most was seeing the profound impact that excellent leadership and healthy workplace cultures have on the lives of employees. At 25, equipped with his management technique and personal conviction, Jacques set out on a mission to Make This a Better World to Work In by improving the effectiveness of leaders and creating workplace cultures that bring out the best in people
1986–1990: Developed the BlueLeader™ Model
The key is in developing leaders who can motivate and empower people to achieve excellence and create workplace cultures where people thrive. Not being satisfied with the effectiveness of existing leadership programs, Jacques decided to create a leadership model and development method that could produce real, lasting improvement. He spent the next five years developing what became the BlueLeader™ Model, a simple and practical framework that helps leaders motivate and empower people to achieve excellence and create workplace cultures where people thrive. In 1991, he founded Jacques Fischer EVOLUTION, the organization that would later become CulturalChange.
1991–1998: Fine-tuned Leadership Development Methods
During this period, we focused on delivering leadership programs that were simple, practical, and immediately applicable. We focused our attention on what many consulting firms overlooked: the need to create simple and practical models of leadership that can be implemented the next day. While others designed complex frameworks that were difficult to apply, we built methods that were easy to understand and that leaders could use immediately. This focus remains one of the primary reasons for the long-term success of our programs. After a training program, participants often tell us, “You taught me nothing new, but now I understand things completely differently.” We helped leaders understand their subconscious leadership models, evolve their mindset, and build sustainable improvements in their effectiveness. Even today, leaders who participated more than 25 years ago tell us they still use specific models from those programs in their daily leadership and that their notebook is still on their shelf in the office. During this time, we trained thousands of leaders from CEOs to team leaders, coached hundreds of executives, and developed internal train-the-trainer systems to help organizations deliver our programs internally. There came a moment when there were no new questions. The BlueLeader™ Model was mature, the development methods were perfected, and we were ready to take the next step.
1998–2003: Led Our First Companies Through Cultural Change
In 1998, British American Tobacco acquired Rothmans. In Switzerland, the merger meant downsizing each headquarters by 50 percent and merging them into one. We were delivering leadership development programs for BAT at the time. Seeing how destructive the downsizing process was for their people and culture, we offered to lead the creation of a new culture for the merged organization. We applied our full leadership model to this complex challenge and developed new systems to manage the change. The project was a resounding success. Shortly after, we guided a fast-growing telecommunications company through cultural change. These two projects revealed consistent patterns of resistance and derailment that cause change initiatives to fail.
2004–2007: Created the Pulscipline™ Change Management System
Leading organizations through change is the highest form of leadership, and mastering it became our next focus. Jacques spent three years studying the root causes of the 70 percent failure rate in organizational change initiatives. He identified what we now call the Inhibitors of Change and developed methods to overcome them. He combined these methods into an overall Inhibitors Strategy that identifies and eliminates inhibitors throughout the change initiative. The Inhibitors Strategy, combined with the BlueLeader™ Model and the change management systems we had already developed, became the foundation of the Pulscipline™ Change Management System.
2008–2013: Fine-tuned Cultural Change Methodology
In 2007, we shifted our focus from training leaders to leading corporations through cultural change. We began by delivering our HR Strategic Partner for Organizational Change program, designed to help HR leaders better support transformation across their organizations. Around the same time, Philip Morris International decided to develop next-generation products to replace the cigarette and needed to transform the culture of its R&D function to make that possible. We were chosen to lead that transformation, the first project where Pulscipline™ was implemented as a complete system
2014: Evolved to Developing High-Performance Organizations
Our leadership development and cultural change projects were very successful, and through them, it became evident that evolving the culture of an organization naturally leads to improving its performance. The purpose of all organizational change initiatives is to improve results and ultimately to become a High-Performance Organization. We discovered the three key elements for a High-Performance Organization and how to develop them: •Leadership Effectiveness •Winning Culture •Executional Excellence When developed in that order, they generate the best results. Our focus shifted to developing High-Performance Organizations. Even if an organization’s initial objective is to improve leadership, that change naturally evolves the culture and improves performance. The same applies to organizations that want to change their culture. All organizational change efforts, no matter their starting point, will involve changes to leadership, culture, and performance. Ultimately, they are all striving to become High-Performance Organizations.
Pulscipline™ Model in Continuous Evolution – 100% Success
As we continue to lead organizations through change, we refine our Pulscipline™ Change Management System to address new inhibitors and integrate new learnings. Each project increases the system’s robustness. Today, Pulscipline™ still has a 100% Success Rate in achieving clients’ change objectives. To date, we have: •Led 30+ corporations through change •Coached 200+ top leaders through transformation •Built 30+ High-Performance Organizations •Trained 20,000+ leaders worldwide
Some of Our Change Projects
Over the years, we have helped organizations around the world to: •Create High-Performance Organizations to improve results •Evolve culture to support new operating models •Build effective leadership cultures after periods of fast growth •Launch new products by creating the culture required for success •Reestablish healthy cultures after downsizing •Heal the Wounds after mergers, downsizing, or cost-cutting initiatives •Reverse negative market trends •Improve performance to protect sites from closure
Global Reach
Our work has taken us across industries and continents, from Europe to Asia, partnering with organizations such as Philip Morris International, Orange Communications, British American Tobacco, Logitech, Merck Serono, Deloitte, Rolex, and the University of Chicago. Our network of senior consultants enables us to deliver projects worldwide, always with the same focus: strengthen leadership, evolve culture, improve performance, and build High-Performance Organizations.
Next Chapter
Today, our focus is on making the principles of BlueLeader™ and Pulscipline™ accessible to leaders and organizations worldwide. Through digital learning and global collaboration, we continue advancing our mission. Join us in Making This a Better World to Work In.
At the Heart of Our Work
At the heart of everything we do is one belief: people matter.
When organizations treat people the right way, employees provide the discretionary performance needed to achieve results once thought impossible.
We develop leaders who can make that belief a reality.
Together, let’s Make This a Better World to Work In.