Jana Werner told an interviewer on June 2 that she now puts a single question to every chief executive she advises: what are you doing, or not doing, that makes it harder for the people closest to the work to deliver value? Werner and Phil Le-Brun, colleagues on the enterprise-strategy team at Amazon Web Services, published The Octopus Organization with Harvard Business Review Press this year, a book built on the rather unflattering fact that 88 per cent of corporate transformations fail. Three consultants at Boston Consulting Group had reached much the same verdict a fortnight before Werner’s interview. In How Change Really Works, published on May 19, Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson wrote that companies had poured trillions of dollars into change programmes, and that failures were rarely failures of strategy.
Over at Bain & Company, Hernan Saenz published the firm’s annual survey of chief executives in June alongside colleagues Dunigan O’Keeffe and James Allen. The bosses they polled were confident in their strategies. Nevertheless, fewer than half believed their organisations could adapt and execute at the speed their markets now demanded, and only 52 per cent said they had working routines for running the business and changing it at the same time. Just 41 per cent protected calendar time for the work only a chief executive can do. The same share kept a standing list of initiatives to prune.
Richard Churchill, a principal consultant at Leading Resolutions, an IT consultancy, wrote in May that funding was rarely the limiting factor in the transformation programmes he had watched stall. Instead, “the constraint is delivery capacity”. Portfolios swelled to dozens of workstreams while the same subject-matter experts were booked across all of them, and operational teams were asked to keep existing services running while rebuilding them. Corporate announcements through the winter gave his argument weight.
In January Dow said it would cut around 4,500 jobs, 13 per cent of its workforce, as part of a restructuring that would automate work processes from end to end. Reuters reported in February that UBS expected some 3,000 roles to go as the Credit Suisse integration continued, even as the bank planned to hire up to 3,000 technology staff in India.
Small hands, big plans
Karen Kerrigan, who runs the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, a lobby group in Washington, released her organisation’s annual health check of American small employers in February. Most of her findings were relatively cheerful, not least that 71 per cent of owners had improved their financial performance in 2025, and 92 per cent described their firms as stable or growing. She flagged the limit herself. Workforce shortages were eating into operational capacity, and though many owners had turned to AI to plug the gaps, “an actual human is needed for many jobs”. Andrew Chamberlain, principal economist at Gusto, a payroll firm, had made a similar observation in December: owners’ confidence in their own companies coexisted with deep pessimism about the economy around them. A March survey of 1,092 micro-businesses conducted for Simply Business, an insurance broker, put the pattern in starker terms. 73 per cent of owners said they felt more confident than on the day they opened. 57 per cent had seen flat or falling revenue since then. Asked what held back growth, 54 per cent pointed not to money or ideas but to time, and 80 per cent said they still did the administration and bookkeeping themselves.
What the failed programmes shared, in the diagnosis Werner offered on June 2, was not a shortage of conviction at the top. Leaders professed to want empowered teams and then fell, she said, “into the trap of decision hoarding”. Her book with Le-Brun catalogued 36 such antipatterns, habits that kept firms operating like the Tin Man (their image): slow-moving automatons, controllable in theory, seizing up in practice. Dhar, Ellmer and Jameson described the aftermath. Each failed attempt left what they called “scar tissue”, and the scarring reduced an organisation’s ability to change the next time. They also measured a gap they labelled change distance, separating the executives who design programmes from the employees expected to live with them.
The prescriptions converged. Saenz and his co-authors advised bosses to shrink the agenda to a few large moves and to treat execution as a repeatable system rather than a management aspiration. Churchill recommended sequencing programmes around the delivery capacity a firm actually had rather than the capacity its plan assumed. The BCG authors told leaders to measure employees’ confidence and capacity continuously, and to act on what the measurements showed. All point to the same thing, namely that reinvention should never be carried out until an organisation is at least partially up for the challenge.
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