My houseplants were looking a little bit ragged this weekend. I’ve never had a green thumb, but I watered them and they had been doing well for a few years. Turns out my house cleaner has been doing the real work to make sure they thrive and she’s been out of town for a month. I saw…
Big transformation programmes used to make a lot of sense. For most of modern history, organisations would run for a period of time and then need to make a change. So they’d set up a programme, run a transformation, project, or change over a set period of time, and then go back to a steady…
For most of the modern era, leaders have been able to ignore the fundamentals of how their organisations actually work. Operating models were left to accumulate rather than being deliberately designed. Nobody owned them. Coordination across functions was assumed rather than built. And for decades, many organisations got away with it. They got away with…
The World Economic Forum, with Kearney, has published a blueprint for an AI-first enterprise. It is one of the best papers I have read of how deeply AI changes the way an organisation creates value, and a good deal of it is simply correct. So let me start with what it gets right, because there…
Most businesses cannot afford their operating model. They just do not know it yet. That is not a provocation for its own sake. It is the conclusion I keep arriving at after years inside complex global organisations and now working with the leaders trying to scale them. The patterns that cause operating models to fail…
There is a familiar pattern in how organisations approach major change. They invest in technology, process redesign, and a training plan. They commission a change management workstream, usually late in the programme when the design is already set. They measure adoption at go-live and call it done. This pattern has always been inadequate. For AI,…
Some of the most critical evidence about how an organisation really operates is not missing from the record because nobody thought to capture it. It is missing because it lives in conversations, relationships, and informal agreements that happen outside of any system and were never meant to be logged. I worked with a team that…
Last week, 11,000 people were told they no longer had jobs. Meta cut 8,000, framed explicitly as the cost of becoming an AI-first organisation. Intuit cut 3,000 on the same morning, with their CEO making a point of saying this had nothing to do with AI. The reason given was reducing complexity, streamlining execution, cutting…
A CFO I worked with at a global professional services firm had a problem she could not get underneath. Sales numbers were being hit. Bonuses were being paid. And yet the company kept missing its overall revenue targets, quarter after quarter. The data showed her the gap but could not tell her where it was…
Most organisations I speak with know something is wrong before they call me. They know they have a problem. They can see the symptoms. Decisions that should take days are taking weeks. Teams that should work together have built workarounds and shortcuts to avoid each other. Initiatives keep launching but improvement keeps failing to materialise….
I have spent the better part of two decades inside large organisations, watching the same problem appear in different costumes. A company scales quickly. Headcount doubles. New markets, new products, new reporting lines. Leadership hires smart people and builds processes to manage the growth. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that activity, something…
