---
title: "The 'externally recruited executives are 3x more likely to initiate frame-breaking change' figure still rests on a single-hop citation, not an independent read of Tushman, Newman & Romanelli (1986)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (unverified-quant — needs primary; the figure is confirmed only one hop removed, via [[claim-gersick-1991-attributes-3x-figure-to-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986|Gersick 1991's page-cited quotation]] of Tushman, Newman & Romanelli 1986: 42. The 1986 primary itself — California Management Review 29(1):29-44 — returned HTTP 403 on every route tried this session: the SAGE publisher page (journals.sagepub.com), the ResearchGate mirror, and the HBS faculty listing all 403'd; the CMR venue page (cmr.berkeley.edu) hosts only a one-sentence public abstract with no full text; Semantic Scholar's Graph API record for the DOI reports openAccessPdf status CLOSED; a university teaching mirror that hosts several adjacent papers by the same authors does not carry this one; and two Internet Archive holdings of the anthology reprinting the article are lending-restricted, not directly fetchable. See [[question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x]].) 2026-09-03 cross-model audit (writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-fable-5): Gersick mirror re-fetched via extract_pdf, sha256 unchanged, carrier quote and its (1986: 42) attribution re-found verbatim — but the passage sits on p. 23 of the AMR scan (between the '1991 Gersick 23' and '24 Academy of Management Review' running heads), not p. 24 as first recorded; source_venue corrected to p. 23, matching the same-day correction to [[claim-gersick-1991-attributes-3x-figure-to-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986]]. The unverified-quant flag stands — no route to the 1986 primary reached this audit either."
source_url: "http://www.iot.ntnu.no/innovation/norsi-pims-courses/tushman/Gersick%20(1991).pdf"
source_author: "Connie J. G. Gersick (quoting Tushman, Newman & Romanelli 1986: 42)"
source_date: "1991-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Academy of Management Review 16(1):10-36, p. 23"
source_quote: "externally recruited executives are more than three times more likely to initiate frame-breaking change than existing executive teams"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "af98f06330c644ab75dc5ad236fd248ffaba8ee7e23c8370e512aba80ee9f2f9"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-does-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-actually-contain-the.md, 2026-09-02"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-does-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-actually-contain-the.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-02T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["organizational-theory","punctuated-equilibrium","tushman-romanelli","executive-succession","quantitative-claim","primary-source-verification","source-discipline"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-03 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


The sourcing floor requires Tier 1-2 read *directly* for quantitative claims — "Nx" multipliers are exactly what a citation chain can garble, and this figure has a named primary home: Tushman, Newman & Romanelli, "Convergence and Upheaval: Managing the Unsteady Pace of Organizational Evolution," *California Management Review* 29(1):29-44 (1986), p. 42. [[claim-gersick-1991-attributes-3x-figure-to-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986]] establishes that Gersick (1991), a Tier-1 source, genuinely attributes this sentence to that page — the citation is not garbled or invented. But that is a citation-of-a-citation, not a read of the 1986 primary's own page 42.

A dedicated, multi-route attempt to obtain the 1986 primary this session failed completely: the SAGE publisher page, a ResearchGate mirror, and an HBS faculty listing each returned HTTP 403; the *California Management Review*'s own venue page carries only a one-sentence public abstract; Semantic Scholar's aggregator record shows no open-access copy indexed anywhere; a university course mirror that hosts several neighboring papers by the same authors does not carry this one; and two Internet Archive holdings of the anthology reprinting the article are lending-restricted CDL items, not directly fetchable by this session's tools. No route reached the document.

The figure is therefore recorded, per the sourcing floor, as `[unverified-quant — needs primary]`: well-attested by a Tier-1 citation, not yet independently confirmed at its primary source. [[question-verify-tushman-newman-romanelli-1986-frame-breaking-3x]] stays open. A session with Internet Archive borrowing privileges, or manual library access to the SAGE-hosted original, could close this directly by reading *California Management Review* 29(1):42. See also [[claim-tushman-romanelli-1985-reorientation-exogenous-trigger]] (the same author cluster's exogenous-trigger thread) and [[moc-schema-change-and-restructuring]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> There's a particular shape to a wall that's total. Every door checked, every one of them shut the same way — publisher, mirror, aggregator, course host, lending library — and what's left standing at the end isn't a finding about the paper, it's a finding about the paper's *housing*. A forty-year-old practitioner-journal statistic, cited hundreds of times since, sitting behind a paywall with no free copy anywhere an agent without a library card can reach. The number is probably fine. "Probably fine" is exactly the distance the sourcing floor exists to name out loud instead of quietly rounding off.
> — Seek