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The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider to describe the relationship between our emotional and cognitive brains. While the rider (representing our cognitive brain) may feel in control, it is the elephant (our emotions) that is more likely to determine which direction we will go.
That’s why it feels so good to act on our emotions. Rather than struggling with the reins to get the elephant to go where we want it to, we can just give in and race with abandon towards our destination. It’s usually not until we’ve run off a cliff that we realize that we should have exercised more restraint. By that time, it’s often too late to undo the damage.
The truth is that our brains are wired for survival, not to make rational decisions for a modern, industrialized economy. That’s why we shouldn’t blindly trust our feelings. We should see them as warning signs to proceed with caution because, while they can alert us to unseen dangers, they can also be triggers that others use to manipulate us.
The Thrill Of The Shift & Pivot
As Eric Ries explained in The Startup Way, when General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt wanted to implement a more entrepreneurial approach he asked Ries to help him implement “Lean Startup” methods at the company. The resulting program, called Fastworks, trained 80 coaches and launched a hundred projects in its first year. Pretty soon, Immelt was calling his company a 124 year-old startup.
A key ambition was the development of Predix, an industrial software platform. No longer would GE be a boring old manufacturing company, but would make a “pivot” to the digital age. It did not go well. During Immelt’s tenure, the company’s value would fall by 30%, while the broader maker more than doubled. Eventually the firm would collapse altogether.
Pundits love to tout the change gospel, but there’s little evidence that “pivots” are necessarily a good idea. Look at the world’s most valuable companies, Apple still makes most of its money on iPhones, Microsoft’s success is still rooted in business software, Alphabet’s profits come from search and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but most organizations become and stay successful by deepening their capabilities in a few key areas.
But that’s boring. Journalists rarely write cover stories about it. Business school professors don’t get tenure for writing case studies about how Procter & Gamble stuck with soap for more than a century or how Coke continues to make money off of sugary water. “Pivots,” on the other hand, are thrilling and fun. They get people talking. They feel good. That’s why they’re so popular.
The Eden Myth
Watch pundits on cable news or on stage at conferences and you may begin to notice a familiar pattern. They tell us that once there was a period when everything was pure and good, but then we—or the organization we work for—were corrupted in some way and cast out. So to return to the good times, we need to eliminate that corrupting influence.
This Eden myth is as old as history itself and it continues to thrive because it works so well.. We’re constantly inundated with scapegoats— the government, big business, tech giants, the “billionaire” class, immigrants, “woke” society—to blame for our fall from grace. The story feeds our anger and, much like the “thrill of the pivot,” makes us want to act.
Perhaps most importantly, the Eden myth makes us feel good. The outrage it triggers stimulates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine which affects the pleasure centers in our brain. Our adrenal glands then begin to produce cortisol, which initiates a “fight or flight” response. Our senses get heightened. We feel motivated and alive.
Who wouldn’t want to feel like that? That’s why we can become addicted to the outrage-dopamine response machine and continually look for new opportunities to get our fix. We begin to need it and tune in every night, doom scroll on social media and seek out social connections that promote it. Ultimately, we’re going to want to act on it.
People who seek to manipulate us know all about this and design their approach to trigger an emotional response.
Creating An Echo Chamber
Once our neurons are primed and our senses are tuned to respond to specific stimuli, we will begin to frame what we experience in terms that reinforce those biases. Psychologists have found that we tend to overweight information that is most easily accessible and then look for information to confirm those early impressions and ignore evidence to the contrary.
These effects are multiplied by tribal tendencies. We form group identities easily, and groups tend to develop into echo chambers, which amplify common beliefs and minimize contrary information. We also tend to share more actively with people who agree with us and, without fear of questioning or rebuke, we are less likely to check that information for accuracy.
We are highly affected by what those around us think. In fact, a series of famous experiments first performed in the 1950’s, and confirmed many times since then, showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research has found that the effect extends to three degrees of social distance.
It’s likely that some version of this is what doomed Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric. When he took over as CEO in 2001, Silicon Valley was in a process of renewal after the dotcom crash. As the startup boom gathered steam, it captured the imagination of business journalists. He brought in Ries to “cast out” the old ways of plodding, industrial firms and surrounded himself with people who believed similar things. Everything must have felt right.
The elephant was in full control and the rider just went along—all the way off the cliff.
Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes we encode experiences in our bodies as somatic markers and that our emotions often alert us to things that our brains aren’t aware of. Another researcher, Joseph Ledoux, had similar findings. He pointed out that our body reacts much faster than our mind, such as when we jump out of the way of an oncoming object and only seconds later realize what happened.
Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. Our bodies evolved to make decisions quickly in life or death situations. Our rational minds came much later and don’t automatically engage. It takes effort to bring in the second system.
There are some contexts in which we should favor system one over system two. Certain professions, such as surgeons and pilots, train for years to hone their instincts so that they will be able to react quickly and appropriately in an emergency. When we have a bad feeling about a situation, we should take it seriously and proceed with caution.
However, our feelings need to be interrogated, especially in areas for which we do not have specific training or relevant expertise. We need to gain insight into what exactly our feelings are alerting us to and that requires us to engage our rational brain.
Yes, feelings should be taken seriously. They are often telling us that something is amiss. But they are much more reliable when they are alerting us to danger than when they are pushing us to overlook pertinent facts and proceed with a course of action. When we go with our gut, we need to make sure it’s not just because we had a bad lunch.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay
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In 1975, more than 80% of US corporate assets were tangible assets, things like factories, equipment and real estate. When leaders in an organization made decisions about change, they tended to involve tangible, strategic assets, such as building a new factory, entering a new market or launching a new line of products.
So when the modern practice of change management arose in the 1980s, that’s what it was designed to address. Managers began to recognize the need to communicate changes to the rank and file, so that they could better understand it and contribute to its success. An entire cottage industry of consultants arose to fill that need.
But now that situation has flipped and more than 80% of corporate assets are intangible. When we talk about change today we are usually talking about changes in people themselves, in how they think and how they act. Clearly, that’s a very different type of thing and we need to approach change differently. Unfortunately, too many people are mired in the past.
Myth #1: If People Understand Change, They Will Embrace It
Leaders like to be seen at the cutting edge and, to be effective, they need to believe in themselves. That’s what makes transformational initiatives so attractive. They’re much more fun than the more mundane aspects of managing an enterprise, like improving operations or cutting costs. Change gives leaders a chance to dream.
That’s what the practice of change management was designed to support. Someone high up in an organization would get an idea to, say, launch a new product line for a new market and the consultants would be brought in to help communicate the idea so that everyone could understand just how brilliant the idea was.
Of course, even if employees thought the idea was stupid there wasn’t much they could do about it. If a CEO wants to launch a new product line, invest in new factories and equipment and hire new people, there’s nothing the rank and file can do about it. Leadership has full control over tangible, strategic assets.
But today, when the vast majority of corporate assets are intangible, transformation initiatives involve changes in how people think and what they do, which leadership does not control. People have the power to resist and you can be sure they will. That’s why change fails, not because people don’t understand it, but because they don’t like it and actively sabotage it.
The truth is that humans form attachments to other people, ideas and things. When they feel those attachments are threatened, they will often lash out. That’s why when you ask people to change how they think or what they do, you will invariably offend some people’s identity, dignity and sense of self and they will act out in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. That doesn’t make them bad people—we all do it—it just makes them human.
Myth #2: You Have To Convince The Skeptics
There is something baffling about human nature. Whenever we have an idea we are passionately about we feel intense desire to convince skeptics. Our inner marketers want to identify specific objections and then devise airtight arguments to counter them. We envision ourselves being dazzlingly persuasive and making our case.
Change management consultants encourage this type of thinking. They advise us to “provide simple, clear choices and consequences” and “show the benefits in a real and tangible way.” They also suggest that we have “open and honest conversations” and “even make a personal appeal” in order to “convert the strongest dissenters.”
This may make sense if the objections are rational, but often they are not. In fact, the most visceral dissent almost invariably has more to do with how people see themselves. That’s why change so often offends people’s dignity, because their identity is so often wrapped up in what they think and what they do. You can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are.
The good news is that you don’t have to. Consider the scientific evidence:
Sociologist Everett Rogers‘ “S-curve” research estimated that it takes only 10%-20% of a system to adopt an innovation for rapid acceptance by the majority to follow.
Professor Erica Chenoweth’s analysis of over 300 political revolutions in the past century finds that it only took 3.5% of active participation in a society to succeed, and many campaigns prevailed with less.
Recent research by sociologist Damon Centola at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the tipping point for change is getting 25% of people in an organization on board.
There’s no need to waste time trying to convince people who hate your idea and want to undermine it in any way they can. Any engagement is very unlikely to be successful and very likely to frustrate and exhaust you. You are much better off focusing your energies on empowering those who are enthusiastic about change to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still. That’s how you build traction.
Myth #3: Things Will Get Easier After A “Quick & Easy” Win
Change management pioneer John Kotter, who first started writing books about organizational transformation in the 1970s, has long advised to establish short-term wins. He stressed that these must be unambiguously successful, visible throughout the organization and clearly related to the change effort.
The concept is problematic for a number of reasons. First, and this isn’t really Kotter’s fault, but the idea of a “short-term win” is often understood to be a “quick and easy win,” which can backfire. If a change isn’t meaningful and relevant, then touting it can make a leader seem out of touch, discrediting the transformation effort.
More problematic is the idea that we should be shooting for projects that are unambiguously successful. That level of success is exceedingly rare. If we are going to wait for perfect projects, we may be waiting a long time. What we want to do is start with a Keystone Change and then learn from whatever successes and failures we encounter on the way.
Perhaps most dangerous of all is the notion that early projects should be visible to large numbers of people. Remember, if a change is significant and has the potential for impact, there will always be people who want to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Why would we want to broadcast early efforts so they can knock them down?
The truth is that things don’t get easier after initial successes. They often get harder because those who oppose change now see it is really possible. That’s why you need to build a plan to anticipate resistance and Survive Victory from the start.
Change for the World We Live In
In the early 20th century, the great sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization taking place would lead to a change in organization. As cottage industries were replaced by large enterprises, leadership would have to become less traditional and charismatic and more organized and rational.
He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into small, specific tasks and be governed by a system of hierarchy, authority and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Weber’s model reigned for a full century.
Over the past few decades we’ve undergone a similar shift from bureaucratic hierarchies to connected ecosystems and that affects how we need to approach transformation. The changes we need to implement today have less to do with decisions made about strategic, tangible assets and more to do with how people think and act. That presents a very different set of challenges and we need to adapt.
What we can’t do is pretend that the world is the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago and continue with practices that are so obviously failing. Just as Weber dispelled myths about infallible leaders a century ago, we need to break free of outdated concepts that have led to unacceptably poor results.
It’s time to leave myths behind and take a more clear-eyed approach to leading change.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay
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Mehdi Hasan’s brutal takedown of Matt Taibbi was almost painful to watch. Taibbi, a longtime muckraking journalist of some renown, was invited by Elon Musk to review internal communications that came to be known as the Twitter Files and made big headlines with accusations regarding government censorship of social media.
Yet as Hasan quickly revealed, Taibbi got basic facts wrong, either not understanding what he was looking at, doing sloppy work or just plainly being disingenuous. What Taibbi was reporting as censorship was, in fact, a normal, deliberative process for flagging problematic content, most of which was not taken down.
He looked foolish, but I could feel his pain. In both of my books, I had similarly foolish errors. The difference was that I sent out sections to be fact-checked by experts and people with first-hand knowledge of events before I published. The truth is that it’s not easy to get facts straight. It takes hard work and humility to get things right. We need to be careful.
A Stupid Mistake
Some of the most famous business stories we hear are simply not accurate. Gurus and pundits love to tell you that after inventing digital photography Kodak ignored the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, its EasyShare line of cameras were top sellers. It also made big investments in quality printing for digital photos. The problem was that it made most of its money on developing film, a business that completely disappeared.
Another popular fable is that Xerox failed to commercialize the technology developed at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), when in fact the laser printer developed there saved the company. What also conveniently gets left out is that Steve Jobs was able to get access to the company’s technology to build the Macintosh because Xerox had invested in Apple and then profited handsomely from that investment.
But my favorite mistold myth is that of Blockbuster, which supposedly ignored Netflix until it was too late. As Gina Keating, who covered the story for years at Reuters, explains in her book Netflixed, the video giant moved relatively quickly and came up with a successful strategy, but the CEO, John Antioco, left after a fight with investor Carl Icahn and the strategy was reversed.
Yet that’s not exactly how I told the story. For years I reported that Antioco was fired. I even wrote it up that way in my book Cascades until I contacted the former CEO to fact-check it. He was incredibly generous with his time, corrected me and then gave me additional insights that improved the book.
To this day, I don’t know exactly why I made the mistake. In fact, as soon as he pointed it out I knew I was wrong. Somehow the notion that he was fired got stuck in my head and, with no one to correct me, it just stayed there. We like to think that we remember things as they happened, but unfortunately our brains don’t work that way.
Why We Get Fooled
We tend to imagine that our minds are some sort of machines, recording what we see and hear, then storing those experiences away to be retrieved at a later time, but that’s not how our brains work at all. Humans have a need to build narratives. We like things to fit into neat patterns and fill in the gaps in our knowledge so that everything makes sense.
Psychologists often point to a halo effect, the tendency for an impression created in one area to influence opinion in another. For example, when someone is physically attractive, we tend to infer other good qualities and when a company is successful, we tend to think other good things about it.
The truth is that our thinking is riddled with subtle yet predictable biases. We are apt to be influenced not by the most rigorous information, but what we can most readily access. We make confounding errors that confuse correlation with causality and then look for information that confirms our judgments while discounting evidence to the contrary.
I’m sure that both Matt Taibbi and I fell into a number of these pitfalls. We observed a set of facts, perceived a pattern, built a narrative and then began filling in gaps with things that we thought we knew. As we looked for more evidence, we seized on what bolstered the stories we were telling ourselves, while ignoring contrary facts.
The difference, of course, is that I went and checked with a primary source, who immediately pointed out my error and, as soon as he did, it broke the spell. I immediately remembered reading in Keating’s book that he resigned and agreed to stay on for six months while a new CEO was being hired. Our brains do weird things.
How Our Errors Perpetuate
In addition to our own cognitive biases, there are a number of external factors that conspire to perpetuate our beliefs. The first is that we tend to embed ourselves in networks that have similar experiences and perspectives that we do. Scientific evidence shows that we conform to the views around us and that effect extends out to three degrees of relationships.
Once we find our tribe, we tend to view outsiders suspiciously and are less likely to scrutinize allies. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Research from MIT suggests that when we are around people we expect to agree with us, we don’t check facts closely and are more likely to share false information.
In David McRraney’s new book, How to Change a Mind, he points out that people who are able to leave cults or reject long-held conspiracy theories first build alternative social networks. Our associations form an important part of our identity, so we are loath to change our opinions that signal inclusion into our tribe. There are deep evolutionary forces that drive us to be stalwart citizens of the communities we join.
Taibbi was, for years, a respected investigative journalist at Rolling Stone magazine. There, he had editors and fact checkers to answer to. Now, as an independent journalist, he has only the networks that he chooses to give him feedback and, being human like all of us, he subtly conforms to a set of dispositions and perspectives.
I probably fell prey to similar influences. As someone who researches innovation, I spend a lot of time with people who regard Netflix as a hero and Blockbuster as something of a bumbler. That probably affected how I perceived Antioco’s departure from the company. We all have blind spots and fall prey to the operational glitches in our brains. No one is immune.
Learning How To Not Fool Ourselves
In one of my favorite essays the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that,” He goes on further to say that simply being honest isn’t enough, you also need to “bend over backwards” to provide information so that others may prove you wrong.
So the first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that your brain has a tendency to fool you. It will quickly grasp on the most readily available data and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then it will seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.
This is especially true of smart, accomplished people. Those who have been right in the past, who have proved the doubters wrong, are going to be less likely to see the warning signs. In many cases, they will even see opposition to their views as evidence they are on the right track. There’s a sucker born every minute and they’re usually the ones who think that they’re playing it smart.
Checking ourselves isn’t nearly enough, we need to actively seek out other views and perspectives. Some of this can be done with formal processes such as pre-mortems and red teams, but a lot of it is just acknowledging that we have blind spots, building the habit of reaching out to others and improving our listening skills.
Perhaps most of all, we need to have a sense of humility. It’s far too easy to be impressed with ourselves and far too difficult to see how we’re being led astray. There is often a negative correlation between our level of certainty and the likelihood of us being wrong. We all need to make an effort to believe less of what we think.
Private Equity is Ruining Everything from Sandwiches to Pet Ownership
LAST UPDATED: January 20, 2026 at 3:59 PM
GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia
I have always maintained that innovation is a byproduct of human curiosity meeting competitive necessity. It is a biological process of sorts; a marketplace needs diversity, mutation, and the survival of the fittest ideas to stay healthy. However, we are currently witnessing a systemic threat to this ecology: the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a dwindling few. This financial gravity is creating a “Consolidation Gravity Well” that is sucking the life out of industries, raising prices, and — most crucially — killing the very spirit of innovation, community and entrepreneurship.
When wealth is widely distributed, it acts as seed corn for a thousand different experiments. But when wealth is concentrated, it becomes a weapon of market stabilization. For those at the top, innovation is often viewed as a threat to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized. The result is a rapid consolidation across industries — from digital platforms to healthcare to agriculture — that leaves consumers with fewer choices and higher bills.
“When wealth concentrates, the marketplace loses its heartbeat. We trade the vibrant pulse of human-centered discovery for the sterile, predictable hum of a monopoly’s balance sheet.” — Braden Kelley
The Erosion of Value for Money
The standard economic argument for consolidation is “efficiency.” Larger firms, we are told, can leverage economies of scale to lower costs. Yet, in practice, we see the opposite. When three or four firms control 80% of a market, they stop competing on value creation and start competing on extraction. Without the threat of a nimble competitor stealing their lunch, these giants engage in “shadow pricing” and “feature stripping.”
The consumer feels this as a decrease in value for money. You pay more for a subscription that offers less; you buy food that is more processed but more expensive; you use software that hasn’t seen a meaningful update in five years because there is nowhere else to go. This is a direct consequence of wealth concentration allowing incumbents to buy their way out of the need to innovate.
How Financial Gravity Sucks Wealth Upwards
Concentrated wealth creates a financial gravity that funnels massive pools of capital — from sovereign wealth funds and ultra-high-net-worth individuals — directly into private equity (PE) vehicles seeking high-return alternatives to public markets. This capital is deployed through aggressive “roll-up” or “buy-and-build” strategies, where a PE firm identifies a stable “platform” company in a fragmented industry — like plumbing, dental services, HVAC, or veterinary care — and systematically gobbles up smaller independent competitors as “bolt-on” acquisitions. By centralizing control, these firms often shift the focus from organic, empathy-driven innovation to “multiple arbitrage” and operational extraction, where value is manufactured by selling the consolidated giant at a higher valuation multiple than the individual pieces were originally purchased for. The ultimate cost is a landscape where consumer prices often spike by 7% to 20%, competition is silenced, and the marketplace loses the healthy diversity required for genuine, breakthrough human-centered innovation.
Case Study 1: The “Kill Zone” in Digital Platforms
In the technology sector, the concentration of wealth has created what venture capitalists call the “Kill Zone.” This is the space around a dominant platform (like Google, Amazon, or Meta) where any startup that shows true innovative potential is either acquired or crushed. Because these giants have nearly infinite cash reserves, they don’t have to wait to see if a startup’s idea is better. They simply buy the team and the patents, often “sunsetting” the product to protect their existing revenue streams. This has led to a stagnation in social media and search innovation, where the goal for founders is no longer to “build a great company,” but to “get bought by the monopoly.” The human-centered focus on solving user problems is replaced by the financial focus of an exit strategy.
The Innovation Debt of Oligopolies
Consolidated industries suffer from what I call Innovation Debt. Because they face no external pressure to reinvent themselves, they continue to polish old, inefficient systems while ignoring the fundamental shifts in human needs. They become brittle. When a shock hits the system—be it a pandemic or a supply chain crisis—these consolidated giants often fail to adapt because they have spent decades optimizing for profit extraction rather than resilient innovation.
Case Study 2: The Consolidation of American Meatpacking
In the mid-20th century, the meatpacking industry was relatively diverse. Today, just four companies control the vast majority of the market. This concentration of wealth and power has allowed these firms to keep prices high for consumers while keeping payments to farmers low. From an innovation standpoint, the industry has stagnated. Instead of investing in more sustainable, humane, or efficient farming practices, the focus has been on process consolidation and political lobbying to prevent regulation. When the supply chain was tested recently, the lack of innovative, decentralized alternatives led to massive price spikes and shortages. The lack of competition meant there was no “Plan B” being developed by a smaller, hungrier innovator.
Case Study 3: Consumer Goods and Shrinkflation Innovation
In consumer packaged goods, consolidation has produced a different form of innovation failure. Fewer parent companies control hundreds of brands. Price increases are disguised through shrinkflation, packaging changes, and marketing narratives.
Instead of innovating on nutrition, sustainability, or affordability, companies innovate on perception management. Value erodes while margins grow.
This is not innovation in service of humans—it is innovation in service of financial engineering.
Case Study 4: How Private Equity is Redefining the Price of Pet Companionship
For decades, the local veterinarian was a staple of the community—an independent practitioner who knew your dog’s name and your family’s budget. Today, that landscape has been fundamentally reshaped. As of early 2026, private equity firms and megacorporations control approximately 50% of all veterinary clinics in the United States, a staggering leap from just 10% a decade ago. This aggressive “roll-up” strategy is not just changing who signs the paychecks; it is systematically altering the economics of pet ownership, pushing life-saving care and insurance out of reach for many families.
The private equity playbook is simple: acquire independent clinics, centralize administrative functions, and implement standardized, profit-maximizing medical protocols. While proponents argue this brings professional management and better technology, the data suggests a different reality for “pet parents.”
“We are witnessing the financialization of empathy. When a clinic’s primary metric shifts from ‘patient outcome’ to ‘EBITDA multiple,’ the price of a pet’s life becomes a line item that many middle-class families simply can no longer afford.”
Case Study 5: The Industrialized Home
In a world of accelerating change, we often focus on digital transformation, but one of the most significant shifts is happening behind the walls of our homes. The plumbing and HVAC sectors, historically dominated by local family businesses, are currently undergoing a massive private equity roll-up. This financialization is fundamentally decoupling the “service” from the “provider,” leading to an environment where the objective is no longer the longevity of the machine, but the maximization of the average service ticket.
“When a technician is carrying a sales quota instead of a toolbox, the pride of an effective and reasonably priced repair dies. We are trading the resilience of our home infrastructure for the sterile efficiency of a private equity exit strategy.”
— Braden Kelley
The “Roll-Up” Reality: Sales over Service
By early 2026, it is estimated that nearly 40% of residential service revenue in major U.S. metropolitan areas is captured by private equity-backed platforms. These firms utilize a “platform and bolt-on” strategy: they buy a large, reputable local company and then acquire smaller competitors to “bolt on” to the operation. While the name on the truck remains the same to preserve generational trust, the internal culture is replaced by high-pressure sales training.
Mini-Case 1: The Wrench Group and the Pricing Surge
The Wrench Group, backed by Leonard Green & Partners, has become a dominant force in the trades. By consolidating major brands like Abacus and Coolray, they have built a multi-billion dollar platform. In many markets where Wrench or similar entities have taken over, homeowners have reported that a standard “capacitor fix” (a $20 part) that used to cost $150 now frequently results in a $15,000 quote for a full system replacement. This shift effectively raises the barrier to home maintenance, making homeownership increasingly unattainable for the middle class as “repairability” is phased out in favor of “replacement cycles.”
Mini-Case 2: TurnPoint Services and the “Membership” Trap
TurnPoint Services, supported by OMERS Private Equity, has rapidly acquired dozens of local plumbing and electrical brands. A core part of their “innovation” is the aggressive push for proprietary membership programs. While marketed as preventative maintenance, these programs are often designed as lead-generation engines. Technicians are trained to find “critical failures” during routine check-ups, using the membership as a hook to keep the homeowner within the corporate ecosystem. This decreases value for money by forcing consumers into a subscription model for services that were historically transactional and transparent.
The Negative Impact on Innovation
This consolidation has a chilling effect on true innovation. Instead of developing more durable HVAC components or more efficient plumbing diagnostics, “innovation” in the sector is now focused on financing algorithms and sales psychology. When the market is controlled by a few giants whose goal is to sell the company in 3 to 5 years, there is no incentive to invest in 20-year solutions. The result is an Innovation Debt that the homeowner pays through premature system failure and inflated insurance premiums driven by the rising cost of emergency repairs.
The Human Cost of Consolidation
From a human-centered perspective, consolidation produces predictable harms:
Customers pay more for less value
Workers face fewer employers and weaker bargaining power
Entrepreneurs encounter higher barriers to entry
Society loses resilience and adaptability
Innovation ecosystems require tension. Consolidated systems eliminate it.
Rebuilding Conditions for Real Innovation
Restoring innovation is not about punishing success—it is about restoring balance. Healthy systems reward value creation, not value extraction.
That requires:
Modernized antitrust frameworks
Capital access beyond elite networks
Open, interoperable platforms
Human-centered success metrics
Innovation flourishes when power is distributed, competition is real, and human needs—not financial optimization—define progress.
The Path Forward: Human-Centered Systems
If we want to reignite the engine of innovation, we must address the wealth concentration that enables this consolidation. We need policies that protect the “biodiversity” of our markets. Innovation thrives when the barriers to entry are low and the rewards for genuine value creation are high. An innovation speaker like Braden Kelley might tell a boardroom, “Growth is not a zero-sum game of acquisition; it is a generative process of empathy-driven creation.”
We must shift our focus back to the human. When we design markets that prioritize the few, we lose the genius of the many. It is time to climb out of the consolidation gravity well and build an economy that rewards those who dare to build something new, rather than those who simply have the deepest pockets to buy what already exists.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does wealth concentration lead to industry consolidation?
When massive amounts of capital are concentrated in the hands of a few entities or individuals, those players possess the “financial gravity” to acquire competitors, build insurmountable barriers to entry, and buy out emerging startups before they can challenge the status quo.
Why does consolidation decrease innovation?
Innovation requires biological diversity in the marketplace. When an industry consolidates into a duopoly or oligopoly, the remaining players lose the incentive to take risks on breakthrough ideas, shifting instead to rent-seeking.
What is the “Innovation Tax” on consumers?
It is the combination of rising prices and declining value for money that occurs when competition vanishes. Consumers pay more for stagnant products because they have no alternative.
Postscript
Do yourself a favor and avoid private equity owned sandwich chains like Subway, Jimmy John’s, Arby’s, Panera Bread and Jersey Mike’s Subs that have jacked up prices while simultaneously downsizing portions and replacing ingredients with lower quality alternatives. I now routinely go to grocery stores and get a higher quality sandwich at a lower price.
Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future direction of society based on current factors. It is hard to predict whether commercial, political and charitable organizations will respond in ways sufficient to alter the course of history or not.
Image credits: Grok, Gemini
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Leaders aspire to create a “dream organization” not merely for the sake of prestige or profit, but because they recognize that a deeply aligned, human-centered culture is the ultimate multiplier of potential. In a dream organization, the traditional friction between individual aspiration and corporate objective vanishes, replaced by a shared sense of purpose and psychological safety that allows innovation to flourish naturally. These leaders understand that when employees feel truly seen, valued, and empowered to contribute their best work, the organization becomes antifragile — capable of navigating uncertainty with a level of agility and commitment that cannot be bought or mandated. Ultimately, the quest for a dream organization is an investment in a sustainable future where the workplace acts as a catalyst for both professional excellence and personal fulfillment.
Today we dive deep into what it takes to create a “dream organization” through a dialogue with our special guest.
Helping Leaders Build Their Dream Organization
I recently had the opportunity to interview Oscar Amundsen, a full Professor of Organization Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
He has extensive experience in researching various industries and businesses. His work is focused on change and innovation in organizations. This includes related topics such as leadership, culture, trust, motivation, and organizational development. In these fields, he has published numerous books and scientific articles.
Amundsen’s goal is to develop research-based knowledge AND at the same time make the research concrete and accessible. The point is to make the knowledge useful for creating better organizations. Whether the enterprise is in the public, voluntary or private sector.
1. What does it take for an organization to break its own practices and develop new ones?
Organizations can be seen as ‘organisms’ that develop habits. And we all know that habits are not easy to break. But organizations can also be seen as ‘tools for achieving goals’. Since the world around the organization changes, the organization itself must also change to remain a suitable tool for the (changed) tasks that need to be solved.
As a leader, you must have the ability to identify the need for change. This means you need to look both ‘outward and inward’: What is required of us in a changing environment? And what does this mean for how we work within this organization?
Many leaders overlook that the latter question requires deep knowledge of what is happening inside the organization. Therefore, you should consult with employees who are close to the core tasks of the organization. You don’t know everything yourself, and you need some knowledge from the ‘foot soldiers’ to make the organization better.
I would also add that ‘breaking away’ is precisely a hallmark of all innovation. If you are going to do things in new ways, you have to break with what is established (in a market, in a practice, etc.). However, all such breaks require a willingness to take risks. You can never know with one hundred percent certainty how it will turn out, even though you should of course avoid taking reckless chances with your business. But you must accept that things can go wrong from time to time in order to achieve something new.
2. What are the keys to promoting the ability to both change and innovate?
This is precisely the question that the book answers. I present a research-based model with eight keys to strengthening the ability for change and innovation. The book is therefore structured around eight chapters, each addressing one of these keys. The point is to show how these eight mechanisms influence the capacity for change and innovation. This knowledge gives you the opportunity to build and develop an organization that not only solves its tasks smarter and better, but also becomes an attractive place to be for both leaders and other employees.
3. Why do people resist sharing new practices?
If you have an organization where people are afraid of making mistakes and trying new things, much will happen in secret. In the book, I write about an employee who comes up with a new and efficient way of working but keeps it hidden from both colleagues and managers because she fears her solution deviates from established procedures. She knows the solution is both sound and sensible. It is only when a researcher visits the organization that she (anonymously) shares her new way of working. Her lack of trust in leadership means that a new practice remains with her, even though it could have spread (and been improved) if it had been openly discussed among employees and managers. This organization misses out on the resource that ordinary employees represent for improving and renewing the business.
4. What are the keys for leaders to manage that determine whether trust or mistrust dominates?
Let me first say that trust is worth its weight in gold in this context. The reason is that trust in an organization is absolutely fundamental to building its ability to innovate. In the book I highlight five aspects that explain why and how trust influences the organization’s ability to change and innovate.
As a leader, you should understand these aspects, because only then can you say something meaningful about the state of trust within the organization.
Practicing trust requires a certain degree of courage. Trusting someone always (in principle) involves some risk: You can never be 100 percent certain that the trust you show will be honored. It may sound strange, but despite this, I recommend a more trust-based leadership approach because it has so many positive effects.
Concretely, you should reflect on the signals you personally send out, but may be even more important: You should examine the control systems used in your organization. Is there more control than necessary in some areas? What is the purpose of that control? Is it to ‘catch’ people making mistakes, or is it to learn from mistakes?
5. Why is autonomy so important to employees?
There is solid research evidence to support the claim that autonomy is, in fact, a fundamental human need (along with mastery and belonging). All people function better when they have some influence over their own situation – of course within the goals and frameworks set by the organization. In the book, I discuss how autonomy strengthens people’s motivation and drive – and (not least) increases their willingness to contribute constructively within an organization. It is well-established knowledge from innovation research that autonomy, within good boundaries, is positive for innovation.
6. Why is it important for organizations to have positive vibes and how is this different from optimism?
Optimism is good, but it can actually become a ‘straitjacket’. In the book, I illustrate this through a case where I explain the spectacular fall of mobile phone manufacturer Nokia. At the turn of the millennium, they were the world’s largest mobile phone producer. But a culture developed within the company where it was ‘not allowed’ to raise objections or criticize the strategy. Management only wanted to hear good news. The short version of this story is that Nokia was therefore unprepared when the iPhone entered the market, and gradually disappeared until the remnants were bought up some years later.
On the other hand: Having positive feelings toward your own company, is of great value to the organization. This is something completely different from a demand for pure optimism. Research suggests that such positive feelings influence your relationship with colleagues and the organization. The point is that a positive atmosphere makes you more:
Helpful: The mechanism is ‘feel good – do good’. Things flow more smoothly, including knowledge sharing.
Engaged: You become willing to make sacrifices and go the extra mile.
Protective: You ‘speak proudly’ about the company externally and help prevent dangers and trouble.
Constructive: You are more likely to come up with constructive suggestions.
The last point directly impacts an organization’s ability to change and innovate, while the first three strengthen that ability indirectly.
7. What do tolerance of failure and diversity look like in practice?
Tolerance for mistakes is essential for achieving innovation. In a ‘zero-error culture,’ you will struggle to innovate simply because people are afraid to experiment, to try and fail. Although mistakes will always happen, it is useful to distinguish between different types of mistakes: What you want to encourage (and have more of) are what can be called ‘intelligent mistakes.’
These are mistakes that occur when you deliberately try something new. The goal is to learn so that you can move forward with what you are trying to develop. Other types of mistakes can be called basic or complex. These are the ones you want as few of as possible, but you cannot say they should never exist. Research shows that if you have zero tolerance for mistakes, they will be hidden, and you lose the opportunity to learn from them.
When it comes to diversity, I write in the book about how different types of perspectives and knowledge are valuable for innovation. I emphasize that leaders should demonstrate a certain level of humility and recognize that they need others’ insights to make good decisions.
8. What is practical anchoring and why is it so important?
Practical anchoring is essentially about involving the right employees in change processes. The point is that you need knowledge of actual practice to carry out sensible change work. People in the organization should see the benefit of the changes you are planning if you want them on board when changes are implemented. This makes sense not only for engagement and motivation but also to ensure you don’t create a less efficient organization with duplicate work and potential obstacles to doing a good job.
9. Why does fear play such a big role in organizations’ ability to change & innovate?
This is a broad topic, which I dedicate an entire chapter to in the book. The short version is that fear leads employees to avoid participating and contributing with their knowledge and experience. We are social beings who generally want to avoid the risk of offering an original contribution or asking a critical or fundamental question if there are potential negative consequences. In the Nokia case, we also see that people became tactical regarding their own career opportunities within the organization: They eventually learned that those who asked critical (but necessary) questions lost opportunities in the company. This caused engineers to drift to the sidelines – even on strategic technical issues.
10. Getting 100% participation is always a good thing, right?
There are many benefits to involving people in both innovation and change efforts. The point is to make the best use of the knowledge resources you have within the organization for the benefit of the organization. In addition, you become a more attractive employer if you allow people to participate in development. Modern employees actually expect to have some influence over their work situation and to use their knowledge in ways that benefit both themselves and the organization.
That said, I still emphasize in the book that there is a balance here: It’s not as if everyone should have an opinion on everything and participate in every possible process. That would only create chaos and overload for people in key roles. In the book, I use the term ‘participation satisfaction’ to describe this. People have different needs for involvement—both personally and, most importantly, based on the role they have. Conclusion: Not “the more participation, the better,” but balanced according to need.
11. Any question I didn’t ask that you want to answer?
Well, you haven’t asked me about the title of the book. I want to underline that “the dream organization” is not meant as a utopic situation. Rather, it’s meant more like a goal image. A goal image for those who want to build and become stronger in change and innovation. So, the book is about improving the organization – and at the same time making it attractive to be a part of – as a leader and as an employee.
So, the title of the book is an invitation to raise your gaze a little and ask something like: “What steps could I take to build a better organization? How can I develop a workplace where people like to work – and where change and innovation are a natural part of working?” That’s the kind of organization I want to help make reality with this book.
One thing the pandemic made clear to everyone involved with the knowledge-work profession is that daily commuting was a ludicrously excessive tax on their time. The amount of work they were able to get done remotely clearly exceeded what they were getting done previously, and the reduction in stress was both welcome and productive. So, let’s be clear, there is no “going back to the office.” What is possible, on the other hand, is going forward to the office, and that is what we are going to discuss in this blog post.
The point is, we need to rethink the landscape of knowledge work—what work is best done where, and why. Let’s start with remote. Routine task work of the sort that a professional is expected to complete on their own is ideally suited to remote working. It requires no supervision to speak of and little engagement with others except at assigned checkpoints. Those checkpoints can be managed easily through video conferencing combined with collaboration-enabling software like Slack or Teams. Productivity commitments are monitored in terms of the quality and quantity of received work. This is game-changing for everyone involved, and we would be crazy to forsake these gains simply to comply with a return-to-the-office mandate.
That said, there are many good reasons still to want a return. Before we dig into them, however, let’s spend a moment on the bad reasons first. First among them is what we might call “boomer executive control needs”—a carry-over from the days of hierarchical management structures that to this day still run most of our bureaucracies. Implicit in this model is the notion that everyone needs supervision all the time. Let me just say that if that is the case in your knowledge-work organization, you are in big trouble, and mandating everyone to come back to the office is not going to fix it. The fix needed is workforce engagement, and that requires personal intervention, not systemic enforcement. Yes, you want to do this in person, and yes, the office is typically the right place to do so, but no, you don’t need everyone to be there all the time to do it.
This same caveat applies to other reasons why enterprises are mandating a return. Knowledge work benefits from social interactions with colleagues. You get to float ideas, hear about new developments, learn from observing others, and the like. It is all good, and you do need to be collocated to do it—just not every day. What is required instead is a new cadence. People need an established routine to know when they are expected to show up, one they can plan around far in advance. In short, we need the discipline of office attendance, we just want it to be more respectful of our remote work. In that light, a good place to start is a 60/40 split—your call as to which is which. But for the days that are in office, attendance is expected, not optional. To do anything else is to disrespect your colleagues and to put your personal convenience above the best interests of the enterprise that is funding you.
So much for coping with some of the bad reasons. Now let’s look into five good ones.
Customer-facing challenges. This includes sales, account management, and customer success (but not customer support or tech support). The point is, whenever things are up for grabs on the customer side, it takes a team to wrestle them down to earth, and the members of that team need to be in close communication to detect the signals, strategize the responses, and leverage each other’s relationships and expertise. You don’t get to say when this happens, so you have to show up every day ready to play (meaning 80/20 is probably a more effective in-office/out-of-office ratio).
Onboarding, team building, and M&A integration. Things can also be up for grabs inside your own organization, particularly when you are adding new people, building a new team (or turning around an old one), or integrating an acquisition. In these kinds of fluid situations, there is a ton of non-verbal communication, both to detect and to project, and there is simply no substitute for collocation. By contrast, career development, mentoring, and performance reviews are best conducted one-on-one, and here modern video conferencing with its high-definition visuals and zero-latency audio can actually induce a more focused conversation.
Mission-critical systems operations. This is just common sense—if the wheels start to come off, you do not want to lose time assembling the team. Cybersecurity attacks would be one good example. On the other hand, with proper IT infrastructure, routine system monitoring, and maintenance as well as standard end-user support can readily leverage remote expertise.
In-house incubations. It is possible to do a remote-only start-up if you have most of the team in place from the beginning, leveraging time in collocation at a prior company, especially if the talent you need is super-scarce and geographically dispersed.
But for public enterprises leveraging the Incubation Zone, as well as lines of business conducting nested incubation inside their own organizations, a cadence surrounding collocation is critical. The reason is that incubations call for agile decision-making, coordinated course corrections, fast failures, and even faster responses to them. You don’t have to be together every day—there is still plenty of individual knowledge work to be done, but you do need to keep in close formation, and that requires frequent unscripted connections.
Cross-functional programs and projects. These are simply impossible to do on a remote basis. There are too many new relationships that must be established, too many informal negotiations to get resources assigned, too many group sessions to get people aligned, and too much lobbying to get the additional support you need. This is especially true when the team is led by a middle manager who has no direct authority over the team members, only their managers’ commitment and their own good will.
So, what’s the best in-office/remote ratio for your organization?
You might try doing a high-level inventory of all the work you do, calling out for each workload which mode of working is preferable, and totaling it up to get a first cut. You can be sure that whatever you come up with will be wrong, but that’s OK because your next step will be to socialize it. Once you get enough fingerprints on it, you will go live with it, only to confirm it is still wrong, but now with a coalition of the willing to make it right, if only to make themselves look better.
Ain’t management fun?
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Google Gemini
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When is the last time you changed your mind about anything substantial? Was it another person that convinced you or an unexpected experience that changed your perspective? What led you to stop seeing something one way and start seeing it in another? I will bet it does not happen often. We rarely change our minds.
Now think about how much time we spend trying to change other people’s minds. From sales pitches and political discussions, to what we are going to have for dinner and when the kids should go to bed, we put a lot of time and effort into shaping the opinions of others. Most of that is probably wasted.
The truth is that we cannot really change anyone’s mind. Only they can do that. Yet as David McRaney explains in his new book, How Minds Change, there are new techniques that can help us be more persuasive, but they don’t require brilliant sophistry or snappy rhetoric. They involve more listening than speaking, and understanding the context in which beliefs arise.
Why We Fail To Adapt
We don’t experience the world as it is, but through the context of earlier experiences. What we think of as knowledge is really connections in our brains called synapses which develop over time. These pathways strengthen as we use them and degrade when we do not. Or, as scientists who study these things like to put it, the neurons that fire together, wire together.
It’s not just our own experiences that shape us either. In fact, a series of famous experiments done at Swarthmore College in the 1950’s showed that we will conform to the opinions of those around us even if they are obviously wrong. More recent research suggests that this effect extends out to three degrees of influence, so it’s not just people we know personally, but the friends of our friends’ friends that shape how we see things.
Finally, there are often switching costs to changing our minds. Our opinions are rarely isolated thoughts, but form a basis for decisions. Once we change our minds, we need to change our actions and that can have consequences. We may need to change how we do our jobs, what we choose to buy, how we act towards others and, sometimes, who we choose to associate ourselves with.
In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the point that our beliefs become closely intertwined with our identity. They signal our inclusion in a particular “team.” That’s why contrary views can often feel like an attack. Rather than taking in new information we often feel the urge to lash out and silence the opposing voice.
Meeting The Mind Changing Threshold
As closely as we cling to our beliefs, sometimes we do change our minds. In one study that analyzed voting behavior, it was found that when up to 20% of the information that people were exposed to contradicted their beliefs, they dug in their heels and grew more certain. Beyond that, however, their resolve tended to weaken. The informational environment can deeply influence what people believe.
Their relationship to the subject matter is also important. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) developed in the 1980s both suggest that we treat different topics in different ways. Some topics, such as those that are important to us professionally, we’re willing to invest time in exploring systematically. Others are more marginal to us and we will tend to look for shortcuts.
For example, if we are researching a business investment, we’ll want to gather facts from a variety of different sources and study them closely. On the other hand, if we’re trying to decide which craft beer to select from a large selection at a bar, we’ll rely on subtle cues such as packaging, how the beer is described or what we see others drinking.
If we want to change someone’s mind about something we need to understand their relationship to the subject matter. If they are heavily invested in it, they are unlikely to be swayed by superficial arguments. In fact, weak or purely emotive arguments may suggest to them that the opposite is true. At the same time, if someone is not very knowledgeable or motivated to learn about a topic, bogging them down with a lot of facts is likely to bore them.
Two Strategies For Persuasion
If you want to change somebody’s mind, you can follow two different kinds of approaches. The first, which can be called “topic denial”, argues the facts. The second, called “technique denial,” exposes flaws in reasoning. For example, if you want to convince a vaccine skeptic you can either cite scientific evidence or refute the form of the argument, such as pointing out that while there may be a minimal risk to taking a vaccine, the same could be said of aspirin.
While research shows that both approaches can be effective, we need to keep context in mind. If you are in a trustful environment, such as a professional or scientific setting, a fact-based topic rebuttal can often be effective. However, if you’re trying to talk your crazy uncle out of a conspiracy theory at Thanksgiving dinner, you may want to try a technique rebuttal.
In recent years a variety of methods, such as Deep Canvassing, Street Epistemology and the Change Conversation Pyramid have emerged as effective technique rebuttal methods. Interestingly, they don’t rely on any elaborate rhetorical flourishes, but rather listening empathetically, restating the opposing position in a way that shows we understand it, identifying common ground and exploring how they came to their conclusion.
The truth is that we can never truly change somebody’s mind. Only they can do that. All too often, we treat opinions as if they were artillery in a battle. Yet attacking someone’s beliefs is more likely to raise their defenses than to convince them that they are in error. Before we can convince anyone of anything, we need to first build an environment of safety and trust.
Let Empathy Be You Secret Weapon
When we want to change somebody’s minds, our first instinct is to confront their beliefs. We want to be warriors and fight for our position. Yet because people’s opinions are often a result of their experiences and social networks, countering their beliefs won’t feel to them like merely offering a different perspective, but as an attack on their identity and dignity.
That’s why we’re much better off listening and building rapport. That’s not always easy to do, because staying silent while somebody is voicing an opinion we don’t agree with can feel like a surrender. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, if we can identify a shared value and a shared language in an opposing viewpoint, we have a powerful tool to argue our position.
The truth is that empathy isn’t absolution. In fact, it can be our secret weapon. We don’t have to agree with someone’s belief to internalize it. We all have a need to be recognized and when we take the time to hear someone out, we honor their dignity. That makes them much more willing to hear us out. Lasting change is always built on common ground.
At some point, we all need to decide if we want to make a point or make a difference. If we really care about change, we need to hold ourselves accountable to be effective messengers and express ourselves in terms that others are willing to accept. That doesn’t in any way mean we have to compromise. It simply means that we need to advocate effectively.
To do that, we need to care more about building shared purpose than we do about winning points.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Flickr
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2021 marked the re-birth of my original Blogging Innovation blog as a new blog called Human-Centered Change and Innovation.
Many of you may know that Blogging Innovation grew into the world’s most popular global innovation community before being re-branded as Innovation Excellence and being ultimately sold to DisruptorLeague.com.
Thanks to an outpouring of support I’ve ignited the fuse of this new multiple author blog around the topics of human-centered change, innovation, transformation and design.
I feel blessed that the global innovation and change professional communities have responded with a growing roster of contributing authors and more than 17,000 newsletter subscribers.
To celebrate we’ve pulled together the Top 100 Innovation and Transformation Articles of 2025 from our archive of over 3,200 articles on these topics.
We do some other rankings too.
We just published the Top 40 Innovation Authors of 2025 and as the volume of this blog has grown we have brought back our monthly article ranking to complement this annual one.
But enough delay, here are the 100 most popular innovation and transformation posts of 2025.
These are the Top 100 innovation and transformation articles of 2025 based on the number of page views. If your favorite Human-Centered Change & Innovation article didn’t make the cut, then send a tweet to @innovate and maybe we’ll consider doing a People’s Choice List for 2024.
If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 1-6 new articles every week focused on human-centered change, innovation, transformation and design insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook feed or on Twitter or LinkedIn too!
Editor’s Note: Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all the innovation & transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have a valuable insight to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, contact us.
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In Zone to Win, we lay out a playbook for transformational initiatives that focus on prioritizing a single effort across the entire enterprise for a period of no longer than two years. Core to success is the unswerving commitment of the CEO, the Executive Leadership Team, and the Board of Directors to see this through to completion come hell or high water. That means it is top of the agenda at every operational review and in between has an open-door escalation path to address any obstacles that come up in real time. It also means that the company as a whole is continually getting updates on the progress being made, the importance of the mission, the imperative that it get everyone’s support.
All necessary, all good. That said, there is a hidden discipline that makes the difference between success and failure, one that can be made visible in the annual operating plan, and thereby remove some of the mystery that surrounds transformational success. It begins with the transformation team simply calling out any dependencies it has on deliverables that come from divisions in the Performance Zone.
That list will get supplemented by additional unanticipated requests that inevitably crop up in the race to get to material scale. Taken together, these are the actions that are most subject to delay or deprioritization whenever the Performance Zone gets under performance pressure. The problem is that time is the one resource you cannot replenish, so you can never afford to delay or deprioritize any request from the Transformation Zone.
So, the discipline required for success is to call out every dependency as soon as it becomes visible, put it on a strict timeline, and then monitor it relentlessly through to completion. At every juncture, you will get pushback, not for the request per se but for the timeline on which it needs to be delivered. Capitulating to that pushback is the nice thing to do—the requests always have merit in their own right—but you cannot take that route and expect the transformation to succeed.
To make this brutally clear, if at any time during a transformational initiative, you lose momentum for any reason, that initiative will fall short of the game-changing goals you set for it. Said another way, inertia is a hugely powerful force, and the world does not naturally want to transform. Give it any other path, and it will take it. Your job is to block every other path. You don’t have to be brilliant to do this. You just have to be undistractedly vigilant.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore
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Drum roll please…
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