Test #4

Can You Lead Transformation?

The status quo is enormously powerful, and it is the enemy of change.

Given that transformation is now a fixture of every leader’s job description, and since there is no more dangerous position in business than muddling along and clinging to the status quo, perhaps it’s time for the phrase “leading change” to be declared redundant. To lead is to change and it requires refining how your company operates today while simultaneously disrupting yourself before someone else does.

Yes, it can be difficult enough to master the challenges we’ve described in the previous three chapters—to crystallize a simple plan, build a high-performing team, and create a culture that aligns everyone on behaviors that drive the strategy. The challenge of remaking and reinventing almost every aspect of a company on an ongoing basis can be overwhelming for many leaders, particularly because employees tend to prefer sameness over uncertainty, especially the uncertainty caused by disruption (nothing can set a company on edge faster than a CEO who starts asking a lot of what-if questions). Faced with the prospect of trying to overcome the powerful inertia of the status quo, some leaders instead kick the can down the road, telling themselves that their successor can deal with all the disruptive forces after they have stepped down. Or perhaps they hire a chief digital officer to handle the transformation, not recognizing that the person is likely to be pushed to the sidelines by colleagues who want to protect their empires.

What are the keys to driving transformation? Our approach here is not to provide you with an eight-step process. Such frameworks are readily available elsewhere, and their usefulness can be limited by the simple fact that no single playbook can address the unique challenges that each company faces. Our focus instead is to discuss transformation through the lens of leadership and draw lessons from case studies that will be useful for any executive who is embarking on an effort to drive change. The examples that we share—the New York Times Company, Amgen, and BetterCloud—represent companies in a range of sizes and industries. Most important, though, they reflect different degrees of the urgency with which they had to address the need to transform themselves. For example, Amgen had just come through a long period of rapid growth under Kevin’s leadership and needed to overhaul and streamline its operations for its next phase of growth. The New York Times Company, contending with a precipitous drop in print advertising, had a more urgent challenge to shift its business model to be able to sustain itself as a digital company. And BetterCloud, confronted with an existential threat because of rapid changes in cloud computing, had to “burn the boats” and build a new platform from scratch.

The themes that emerge from the experiences of these three companies help illustrate the key approaches that every leader should keep in mind as they embark on their own transformation efforts. They include:

• Enlist allies to build an unassailable case for the need to change so that everyone understands why the status quo is not an option.
• Clarify what is not going to change, particularly mission and purpose, to make employees more open to new approaches for accomplishing their work.
• Engage your team and others throughout the organization to develop the transformation strategies so that there is a sense of shared ownership (top-down plans don’t work).
• Be transparent and communicate relentlessly at all stages of the process.
• Ensure commitment is shared by the CEO and the top leadership team to implement the plan with clear lines of responsibilities and a scoreboard to measure progress and success.
• Acknowledge the uncertainty but reinforce the certainty of the need to change and the confidence that the organization can be nimble to adjust.

As we share their stories, you’ll no doubt spot other insights that are applicable to your own organization. Again, every company’s challenges are unique, but there are approaches that have universal applicability across every effort.

The New York Times Company

When a headhunter first contacted Mark Thompson about whether he would want to be considered for the CEO job at the New York Times, he said no. Friends also advised Thompson, a veteran BBC executive, to steer clear, in part because the hidebound traditions of the Times would make change nearly impossible. Ultimately, though, he made the leap, particularly after he became convinced that the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controlled the paper, along with the Times’s board of directors, were committed to shaking things up. “I concluded that if the organization would get out of its own way, it could do three or four times better,” he said.

He joined when there were big question marks about how the Times would survive the steep and steady drop in revenue from print advertising that had been the financial lifeblood of the company for decades. The company had to grow its digital operation but the print paper, a mature business, still remained the primary focus of the newsroom. And because of the traditional wall between the news and business sides that exists to protect the journalists’ independence, many in the newsroom were disinclined to engage in discussions to help their business colleagues find answers to the financial challenges.

For Thompson, his guiding principle as he took over the role was not to assume that he had the answer, or that he was expected to come up with one. “You are not going to succeed as a CEO if you try to impose a set of ideas or a new culture on Day 1,” he said. “It just doesn’t work. It’s got to be owned. It’s more a question of trying to pull it out of the organization rather than to push it in, and that meant trying step-by-step to encourage a deeper conversation about the future.”

Because of that historical divide between the newsroom and the business side, he knew that the journalists would view any plans that he championed with some skepticism. So he turned the tables and encouraged the newsroom to pull together a group to study big questions of how the news side could become more innovative. That committee was led by A. G. Sulzberger, who at the time was an editor in the newsroom and is now the publisher of the paper (Adam, one of the authors of this book, was recruited by Sulzberger to be part of that innovation committee). The group took more than nine months to report and write its ninety-seven-page document, which was intended only for a small audience of senior leaders at the Times. But the report was leaked to BuzzFeed, which shared it with the world on May 15, 2014. Its blunt language about all the challenges inside the Times—“We have to look hard at our traditions and push ourselves,” for example—was a deep-breath moment for an institution that prided itself on being considered the gold standard of journalism.

For all the initial worries about the report becoming public, however, it created that crucial shared understanding of the challenges the company faced, which is the necessary first step of any transformation effort. “The first day was brutal,” recalled Sulzberger. “The headlines on the internet were about a devastating report, a scathing report, and the Times in chaos. I had no idea how my colleagues were going to take it. Like so many people in an institution that really cherishes its traditions, I probably was a cautious incrementalist in how I felt that change should be talked about. But after a day or two, it became really clear that the whole conversation was shifting—that the report felt scary to people but also profoundly empowering, and that for the first time they felt like they really understood the context in which their lives and days and work habits were all changing.”

A key lesson for any company attempting its own state of the union report is that it should include only unassailable facts. Sulzberger said:

I wanted the final innovation report to consist entirely of stuff that was unequivocally true. It’s so easy, if you have a big document and platform to articulate your view of the future, to throw a lot of your pet ideas in there. Someone might say, “I think the way we write stories should change like this,” or “We should be looking for these particular qualities in leaders.” But that model is problematic for getting a consensus around the need to change, because you’re introducing ideas that reasonable people can disagree with. And once you’ve introduced ideas that reasonable people can disagree with, you’ve created a relationship with your recommendations that feels like it could be a matter of opinion. What I wanted was to fly at an altitude where we were certain about every recommendation that we included. Our statements were backed by data, and even with the things that were softer, they were things that you plainly couldn’t argue with.

Once the report became public, Sulzberger embarked on an internal road show, meeting for ninety minutes with groups that were capped at roughly thirty people. In all, he met with about twelve hundred journalists. He learned through those conversations the importance of communicating the “why” behind all the new demands on journalists, including building a presence on social media, filing stories faster, and making articles more visual. Sulzberger said:

We never really laid out the framework. So you had this profound dissonance of an executive team really versed in the challenges and why we needed to change, and then you had most of the company, the people who actually do the great work that makes this place special, just being told that they had to change without explaining the broader dynamics. In journalism, we have this saying, “Show, don’t tell.” And we had never shown the problem. We had never given our colleagues the chance to own the problem with us and own the challenge with us. We were just telling them that we had to change. Another big takeaway, and a surprise, was just how much appetite there was in the newsroom for conversations about the report. Many people said they couldn’t remember the last time they had been a part of an open, searching conversation about the company, our strategy, and how we’re executing. It’s just a reminder that communication is often the last item on the checklist but it’s always the most important.

To help allay many of the fears and concerns about whether the Times would be straying from its roots, Sulzberger invoked an expression he had heard from Dean Baquet, the executive editor: for an institution to change, it needs to separate mission from tradition. “Mission should never be tinkered with,” Sulzberger explained. “You mess with mission at your own risk. Tradition needs to be constantly interrogated. Now tradition isn’t necessarily bad. There are traditions that, once you interrogate them, hold up perfectly. And some companies under going change will tear up tradition for the sake of tearing up tradition, and that’s a mistake. But traditions also shouldn’t be kept around for their own sake.”

To do that effectively, leaders need to be crystal clear about their company’s reason for being. Sulzberger said:

If everything is up for grabs, if you can change literally anything about a company, then the company has no reason for being. And if the company has no reason for being, then some younger, hungrier startup should come and displace you anyway. Once you’re able to articulate your reason for being and what’s not going to change, that needs to be communicated really aggressively throughout the company. And if your answer to that is persuasive, it gives people more permission to lean into change. For us, our journalism was not going to change, but everything else can change if it will better service that mission. A big part of my job in terms of communicating with the newsroom staff was getting everyone to understand that we were all aligned around that, which gave everyone permission to sign on for the journey.

Any leader making the case for necessary transformation is going to encounter skepticism from employees. Will the new plan work? The uncertainty has to be acknowledged and addressed head-on. Sulzberger said:

Inevitably, if you are leading change in an organization, you’re going to try some things that will work and some things that won’t work. And when some of the things don’t work, you’re going to stop doing them, and some people are going to say, “See, you guys don’t really know what you’re doing. You’re wasting our time. A year ago, you said that this was going to be a big thing and today it’s just disappeared altogether.” One of the ways I’ve dealt with that is to say, “There is no playbook for us. We are not following a map here. We are blazing a trail. And we are going to try some things that will work, and we will try some things that won’t work, and it may be a waste of your time. And a year from now you may be grumbling at me and saying, why did you ever think this was a good idea at all? But here’s why we’re trying it and here’s what we hope it will do for us if it does work. And if it doesn’t, I’ll explain why.”

The innovation report helped create momentum for change, but the company overall still needed a unifying strategy for leading through its transformation. The old model, which relied heavily on revenue from advertisers, was under threat, as more advertisers were moving their dollars to Facebook and Google. Subscriptions to the print paper had also been a reliable source of revenue in the past, but with more readers getting the news on their phones and computers, the company had to build a new business model for a digital future.

In 2015, CEO Mark Thompson started a regular meeting of what came to be known as the “Friday Group,” involving the top leaders from the business side and the newsroom. For six months, they met each Friday, starting at noon and finishing at around 6 p.m. Thompson knew that the group would have to persevere through some tough discussions to land together on some new insights. “Until we could have a genuinely productive and honest conversation at the top, we weren’t going to get anywhere,” Thompson recalled. “And I was happy to wait. You have to be quite patient. I’ve seen people come into media organizations and try to get dramatic shifts quickly. They tend to be rejected by the antibodies. Many people in the Friday Group were skeptical at first and simply wanted to get back to their busy jobs. We started off talking about the challenges, and by the summer, the meetings were becoming difficult and fraught.”

One idea that emerged in those meetings provided a way to align the two halves of the company around a shared goal, captured in the phrase “subscription first.” The idea was that a singular focus on attracting more digital subscribers would be good for both journalists (who would have more readers) and the business executives (more subscribers would be a reliable revenue source and also attract more advertising dollars). Eventually, and after some intense debate, the “subscriber first” strategy won over the group, and it has provided an important shared scoreboard for the entire company to track its growth. When Thompson was appointed CEO in 2012, it had just over 600,000 digital subscribers. In 2020, it passed the 5 million subscriber mark. And during his tenure, the stock price has more than quadrupled. In 2020, he passed the CEO baton to Meredith Kopit Levien, whom he recruited in 2013 from Forbes to be chief revenue officer.

Amgen

During the two-decade stretch when Kevin served as president and then CEO of Amgen, the company’s primary focus was growth. When his successor, Bob Bradway, took over, the new leadership team recognized that work was needed to get Amgen ready for the next phase of growth. The shorthand they used was that Amgen was “in a good spot, but . . .”

The “but” was that Amgen was like a thirty-five-year-old house with the original plumbing, windows, roof, and electrical systems. The infrastructure needed an upgrade. Some of Amgen’s drugs were coming off patent (meaning big drops in revenue), new product launches needed funding, and the company was planning an expansion into dozens of additional countries. Amgen recognized that if it didn’t make the necessary changes, someone was going to come along, whether a competitor or activist investors, and potentially force those changes from the outside. “We knew we were going to need several quarters to sell the idea internally and to get people moving, and a few quarters to make the changes,” said Bradway. “So we knew that we had time, but not an abundance of it. It was really a case of changing before we have to.”

Pressing for change is always harder when things are going well, but Amgen provides a useful case study on how to disrupt the status quo even when the need isn’t evident to all. Amgen’s leaders started with a simple mantra to start the necessary conversations around transformation: “Build a better company.” “We wanted to create a language and a skill set and a methodology that would enable Amgen to keep changing a decade later,” said Brian McNamee, chief human resources officer on Kevin’s leadership team who was named chief transformation officer by Bradway. “Transformations can be serial events, but if done right, they turn into long-term continuous improvement capabilities,” McNamee added. “So, the goal was to build that capability, to build a better company. We were very careful not to put anything underneath that at the outset, in terms of specifics.”

Bradway and McNamee put a simple question on the table for the leadership team—How do we build a better company? But they did add some ground rules for the coming brainstorming sessions. For example, everybody was told they had to “concede to the middle,” shorthand for signaling that members of the leadership team had to let go of any impulses to protect their respective parts of the business, and that the company’s best interests were going to come first. That meant wrestling with some tough issues, like cost structures that needed to be reined in. “My role was to make sure they were brought into the discussion,” McNamee said. “You’ve got to set the tone up front that these things are going to get put on the table; no more just talking about them in the hallway.”

Bradway then recruited a team of high-potential younger executives inside Amgen, calling them the “Gang of 30,” to explore new approaches to solving some of the company’s challenges. But he also solicited ideas from all levels of the company, sending a clear signal that he wanted to hear every idea they had, even if they seemed a bit off the wall. And as chief transformation officer, one of McNamee’s responsibilities was to ensure that members of the leadership team did not screen out any ideas. Bradway said:

The organization needs to get comfortable with the notion that they can give us the full range of options and leave us to choose the sensible options. We were trying to give the organization confidence that people didn’t have to eliminate the extreme options because they might be afraid that these idiots at the top will choose things that are harmful to the company. Very often, leaders on the rungs below will say, “I don’t want to give them that option because I’m afraid they might choose it,” or they’ll think, “I’m stupid for putting it on the table.” So we had to continuously give them confidence by saying that we want all the options. You have to just keep role-modeling that idea and keep insisting that they bring you the full range of options, even the things that they think are too extreme. Because then we can see that there are a lot of different ways to attack this.

For example, Amgen’s development process for new drugs had long been split into two divisions—R&D and operations—which had created inefficiencies and silo behavior in the company. The team working on that initiative suggested that the two be combined so that programs could move faster, with fewer handoffs, and eliminate overlaps and redundancies. The leaders running the separate divisions, not surprisingly, resisted the notion, but once it was put on the table for the entire C-suite team to review, they made the decision to put them together. “This was a major change from the past, and sent a signal to the organization that this transformation was going to be different in that nothing was off the table in terms of options when it came to building the best company,” McNamee said.

Bradway and McNamee also knew that the process of soliciting and sorting through ideas would have to be coupled with a deliberate communication plan to slowly win over the top five hundred people at the company about the need for the transformation. In business, after all, there is a widely used metaphor of the “frozen middle” of companies, referring to the layer of managers who, to preserve the status quo, keeping ideas from bubbling up from below and freezing out directives from above. But that frozen layer can be much higher in organizations than the leaders might want to believe. So Bradway and McNamee embraced the idea of creating a “sponsorship spine” to ensure that the level of leaders below the C-suite would themselves be won over about the need to change, so that they would champion the plan to their direct reports, who in turn would advocate for the need to change with their teams.

“The CEO can stand up and talk all he or she wants about making change, but at the end of the day, the manager in France or the team leader in Tampa, Florida, is going to go to a conference room and see what his or her direct boss thinks,” Bradway said. “If his or her direct boss says, ‘Yeah, we’ll do the bare minimum,’ or ‘I don’t know what it means, we’ll figure it out later,’ then there’s no energy. If, on the other hand, you go into the conference room and your direct boss is saying, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ and they’re articulating the message in their own authentic voice rather than reading the CEO’s script, that’s the magic and that’s what we did. We recognized that we needed to enlist five hundred people in the storytelling.”

The transformation effort succeeded. It led to cost savings of $1.9 billion, faster growth, and bigger profit margins even as the company expanded into additional countries. After stepping down from Amgen in 2019, McNamee started consulting with other companies on their transformation efforts. One of the most common problems he sees is a false consensus among the leadership team members about the need for transformation in the first place. “One CEO I was working with told me, ‘This is where we’re going, and everybody agrees,’” McNamee said. “I told him, ‘Give me an hour with six of your direct reports.’ After I met with them I told the CEO, ‘There’s no agreement on the current state and there are wildly different views on how we got here.’”

His experience is a powerful reminder that there has to be a shared understanding about the current state of affairs before meaningful discussions can start on what needs to change. “You have to stop and focus and make sure that you’re building an objective view of what the current state is and not bending to the political sensitivities in the room,” McNamee added. “It’s like building a case for the need to change.”

Given the success of the transformation at Amgen, other CEOs often reach out to Bradway for his advice. “I always start with the same question: Are you going to lead it or are you going to delegate it?” he said. “If CEOs delegate transformation, your organization figures it out overnight, and they will be less motivated to follow through. If the CEO is really on it and devoting energy to it, the organization figures that out as well. They realize, oh, I guess we really have to do this.”

BetterCloud

Amgen and the New York Times were able to plan and execute their transformations from broad and solid foundations. They had clear missions and reasons for being, and they needed to reframe how they operate to build on their already well-established strengths.

But what are the lessons of transformation for the thousands of entrepreneurs who grind every day for new customers and for every additional dollar of revenue to build their companies and keep their investors off their backs? Yes, they must master the art of the pivot—the constant fine-tuning adjustments to better meet the demands of the customer. But what if your entire business model suddenly comes into question? Such existential threats require wholesale transformation, magnifying the challenges and accelerating the timetables for change in ways that provide powerful lessons for founders and their leadership teams.

Many CEOs of young companies are reluctant to share such stories, preferring to put up a confident front for their customers and investors. But David Politis of BetterCloud believes that startup CEOs should share the dark moments they face so that they can all learn from each other. “I think it’s important as an entrepreneur to be open about the challenges, and not trying to live the Instagram life of only the really, really good things,” he said. “If you ask entrepreneurs how they’re doing, they almost always say, ‘I’m killing it.’ And you want to say that, but I couldn’t hide what was happening at our company.”

Politis founded BetterCloud in 2011 on the idea that businesses were moving to the cloud by outsourcing their corporate data centers and needed more management and security for cloud applications. The company focused on only one specific application, Google Apps, now called G Suite. By 2015, the company had grown to about sixty employees and a thousand customers, but the technological landscape was changing rapidly. It was as if it had constructed an office building with one kind of electrical outlet, and then suddenly all its tenants were demanding that the building be able to accommodate all the different plugs that are used worldwide. A software patch was not going to fix the problem; the company had to, in effect, open up the walls and completely redo the wiring. “All of a sudden our customers were saying about our core product, ‘It’s nice, but you’re only handling this one small area,’” Politis recalled. “We realized we probably had a ceiling on our business, and that we were going to have to make some big shifts.”

He pulled his top technology team into a meeting and presented the challenge to them. After a wide-eyed reaction to the implications of the problem, they said in disbelief: “We’re going to have to rebuild from scratch.” Because Politis wasn’t a technologist by background, he was relying completely on his team of engineers to find the answer. “Having a team around you that’s in the boat with you, and you trust them and can lean on them, is so important,” he said. He formed a “tiger team” of his top technology and product leaders and announced the new direction to the entire staff in September 2015: “This is going to be a new chapter for the company.”

One certainty for Politis was that he was going to be open with the entire company about the challenges that BetterCloud faced. It’s an approach that he learned from an earlier CEO role. “At that smaller company, I essentially thought I shouldn’t tell anybody anything, because if they know that anything was wrong, they’re going to quit,” he said. “Then 2008 came and we got hit with the financial crisis like everyone else, and we had to let go of half the company in a day. Every one was surprised. We thought we were making all this money, they said. Clearly, I had not told them anything. I was so stressed. Someone gave me the advice, ‘You can’t have all of it on your shoulders. If you’re the only person who knows about it, how can anyone else help to actually improve this or fix the situation?’ I’ll never forget that. Since then, I have always believed in transparency, good or bad.”

While many of the employees were excited by the challenge, others were skeptical that the plan to rebuild the company from scratch was going to be possible. For Politis and his leadership team, it was a clarifying moment to realize who was willing to sign up for what turned out to be a two-year challenge, with no certainty that the plan would work. “One lesson from that time is that different stages of a company attract different risk profiles and different kinds of people, and the persona of the company started to change,” he said. “The only people who were willing to stay on were people who wanted that challenge and that risk. We turned over a lot of people, and the people who stayed were the ones who were ready for the risks.”

To keep people feeling as if they were making progress, even if the ultimate goal seemed far off, he adopted a strategy of celebrating small wins. “There were four pillars of the new technology, and every time we stood one of them up, we would send an email to the whole company to celebrate the milestone and explain why it was really important,” he said. “As we were showing customers what we were doing, we would send their feedback to everyone. If we didn’t tell people what was happening, people would have assumed the product’s never coming out. The salespeople don’t see the code being written. Even the engineers generally only see the code that they write. You have to constantly be telling people what’s happening.”

Despite the small wins, the board of directors of BetterCloud grew impatient a year into the transformation effort, as the timeline stretched beyond the initial deadlines. Politis recalled:

They said, “What’s going on? This is taking longer than expected and we need to see something.” The next day, we called an emergency all-hands meeting, which I had never done before. I told everyone that the board meeting was like getting a root canal, and they were right to ask the questions they asked. This is not a research project. This is a business. We told everyone that we have to cut out anything that is not targeted at getting this platform out or selling the existing platform so that we continue to grow revenue. “If it’s not one of those two things, stop working on that project immediately,” I said. “Don’t ask anyone. I’m not doing anything else. Neither should you, and that’s it. If you don’t want to be here, we’re not going to be offended. We are in the grind now.”

Throughout the process, Politis and his leadership team did hear concerns from employees who felt the company was changing directions too frequently. He addressed the concerns head-on at the next scheduled all-hands meeting. “I talked to them about Amazon and Google and some of the best technology companies in the world,” he said. “Amazon started selling books and look at what their business is today. They didn’t do that by just being bullheaded, putting their head down and running into a brick wall over and over. They went around it. I said that we’re just trying to do the same thing. We don’t know where we’re going to end up. We may not be an Amazon or Google, but why, just for the sake of staying consistent in our strategy, should we look at a brick wall and run right into it?”

Getting the technology right solved just half of the problem. Better Cloud then had to convince customers to adopt it. Politis established a simple goal in January 2017 to rally everyone around: to sign up a hundred customers for the new platform over the next nine months. Yes, they had some relationships already in place that could get them in the door, but they were selling a new solution to a much more complicated problem. They knew they couldn’t count on any easy wins. Politis said:

It was a trying time, but the whole company had one goal. Literally every TV in both offices had a counter from zero to a hundred. That was the only thing that was on the TVs. We started at the beginning of 2017, and by the end of January we had one. In February, we added three more. In March, we had another six, and it was roughly the same for April. It was slow, and we had people asking, “How are we going to get to a hundred?” And by the way, we had no idea if we’d get to a hundred. That was the number that felt to me like critical mass. But we were all swimming together in one direction. The engineering team would say, “What do we need to do to get that customer on board?” Then we had fifteen, and all of a sudden, the momentum started to build. We ultimately blew through our goal and ended September at around 140. We had a massive celebration, with champagne and balloons that said “100” on them. I will never forget those nine months. To limp along at first and then just crush the number at the end was incredible. People were crying. It was crazy.

The transformation has continued to pay dividends, and the company has grown quickly by every measure. Average revenue per account is ten times higher than it was in 2015. The average length of its contracts has stretched from one year to two-and-a-half years. The company’s revenues grew from about $10 million in 2015 to more than $65 million.

Another lasting impact from the effort is that Politis, when he is talking to job candidates and potential new investors, tries to scare them off by talking about the challenges the company faces in the coming years, rather than selling them on the best-case scenario. “Instead of overselling where the company stands, it’s better to share the good, the bad, and the ugly, so that you know someone’s going to be in the boat with you when problems come up,” he said. “The best people, the ones who are still on the team now, are the ones that say to you after you lay out all the problems in the interview, ‘That’s solvable. It’s going to take me some time, but I want to attack that.’”

. . .

Making the case for change can be easier for companies like Better-Cloud and the Times, which faced clear and present dangers, with trend lines on revenue and profits that were plainly unsustainable and that removed the status quo as an option. If there is an iceberg dead ahead, it will be harder for people to say that they should stay the course. For companies where the threats are more amorphous and less immediate, like Amgen’s in 2012, the challenge is exponentially harder. Why fix it if it isn’t broken? Resistance to change is strong enough even when the need is urgent, but it can seem impossible when everything appears fine on the surface. Even though the very best time to change is when things are going well, the leadership challenge always is going to be harder when there are no obvious reasons to take urgent action.

Regardless of the particular circumstances of your organization, the themes we highlighted at the outset, and illustrated through the stories of the Times, Amgen, and BetterCloud are relevant and useful for all leaders. These are the foundations of a leadership playbook for transformation:

• Enlist allies to build the case for change.
• Be clear about what is not going to change as you engage the organization to help develop the new strategies.
• Be transparent and communicate relentlessly.
• Ensure commitment is shared by top leaders to implement the plan, with clear lines of responsibilities and a scoreboard to measure progress.
• Acknowledge the uncertainty while balancing it with the confidence in the team, the new direction, and the ability to adjust on the fly.

Transformation is not a onetime event. It is an ongoing challenge that requires leaders to balance refining how the company operates today while also recognizing the need for constant disruption. It is, in many ways, a mindset to be able to question everything you’re doing even as you’re making decisions about short- and long-term strategies. That may sound like a recipe for paralysis, but it is also a worthwhile goal to which every leader should aspire—to keep reinventing themselves so that they can reinvent their companies. There can be no status quo, for the leaders themselves or the businesses they are leading.

Bracken Darrell, the CEO of Logitech, said:

As you go forward, the more successful you are, the more you have to break things or create this sense of urgency, because people tend to not want to change things when they’re working. So, I am much more focused on changing things on a regular basis now, much more ambiguous than probably the people who work for me like, and much more intuitive about what I really dig into. I’m very explicit about it. I’ve shared a story from 2018, after I’d been on the job for five years. One Sunday night, I asked myself, “Am I the right person for the next five years?” I had made tons of change, and the stock was up about 500 percent. I knew that, on paper, I probably was the right person for the next five years, and that it’s risky to change if you don’t have to. On the other hand, I had been involved in every single personnel and strategic decision. My disadvantage was that I knew too much, and that I was too embedded in every thing we were doing . . .

So I decided that I was going to fire myself, and that I would sleep on the decision. I didn’t share it with anybody, including my wife or kids. I just thought to myself that I might be done. I woke up the next morning and felt that I knew exactly what I needed to do: I have to rehire myself but have no sacred cows. It was super exciting and fun, and I started changing things that I had put in place. Fortunately, I didn’t have to change things radically, but I felt new again. Then I realized that the real opportunity is to compress that time frame from five years to a year and then to a month and then into every day. And if you can get yourself to the point where you can really come in unbiased every day, then you’re there. That’s my ultimate goal, which I think is impossible, but that’s the goal.