Your Transformation Doesn’t Need an Endpoint

Most organizational transformations kick off with a detailed roadmap and a fixed destination due the complexity involved and coordination required. But you may be more likely to succeed if you admit you don’t entirely know where you’re headed.

This (slightly scarier) approach is one that IESE Business School professors Evgeny Kaganer and Christoph Loch explore in a new feature article, “Transformation Should Be a Learning Journey.” With so much in the business environment shifting, they argue, it’s a mistake to be too rigid from the get-go.

Instead, the pair suggest a “learning-oriented playbook” that’s based on their research and consulting experience, which they illustrate with contrasting examples of DBS Bank and GE. It includes:

• Charting a course. Yes, a transformation still needs a vision, and it should be ambitious, inspiring, and concrete. But leaders must accept that it will evolve: “The only permanent characteristics of the vision are that it must inspire a collective endeavor focused on creating as well as capturing value and that it must unite employees from all parts of the company.”

• The transformation journey. Initiatives and projects should still be the building blocks of transformation. But instead of measuring their success by revenue and profits, leaders should center how much their company will learn from each. Kaganer and Loch recommend focusing on four types of projects in particular.

• Leadership challenges. A long-term journey with a shifting roadmap can leave employees disoriented and stakeholders less than enthused. To combat this, leaders need to provide discipline and communication across projects, create a strong internal transformation team, welcome bottom-up ideas, and allow metrics to evolve over time.

“Transformation goals cannot be achieved through decisive action and resources alone,” the authors conclude. “Instead they must be guessed at, explored, revised, and continually reconnected to an evolving vision of what the organization should be.”

A Formula for Geopolitical Risk

Speaking of murky futures, I don’t have to tell you that navigating geopolitics is especially fraught right now. Every company needs to determine exactly where their biggest exposures are and how to buffer against them. But as McKinsey’s Cindy Levy, Matt Watters, and Shubham Singhal note, most leaders aren’t adept at this.

To help, they developed a formula that goes beyond the typical response of “monitor, convene a task force, wait for conditions to stabilize.” With it, you can pinpoint exactly how much value is at stake in your operating environment in order to make better decisions.

For each part of the equation, the authors walk through how to analyze each variable. They also share two examples of organizations that have used it successfully, including a semiconductor firm that “identified significant downside risk in its concentration of operations in China—and significant upside in industrial policy incentives available in other markets.”

The authors get granular on the details; I won’t dig into all of them here. But importantly, they emphasize, “the companies that get this right don’t just measure their exposure once—they treat it as a continuously updated picture of where the world is shifting and what that means for their business.”

Don’t You Know that You’re Toxic?

The downstream effects of hiring a toxic leader can be devastating for an organization: partnerships deteriorate, leadership teams erode, and talented employees get frustrated and leave. But it’s sometimes hard to pinpoint who will prove toxic during the interview process.

According to University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor Steven G. Rogelberg and consultant Douglas H. Reynolds, that’s because the very things that make people appear brilliant during brief encounters are the same things that can poison an organization. So, how can you adjust your interview process to detect this?

The duo recommends assessing “whether candidates have demonstrated the ability to productively manage their interpersonal challenges in previous professional settings, just as they would assess any other critical competency.” They share six steps for doing so, the first of which involves identifying the interpersonal requirements of the role. “Before interviewing candidates, talk to their future peers and others who will work most closely with them,” say Rogelberg and Reynolds. “Determine teamwork requirements, partnership needs, and cultural expectations.”

Then draft questions and identify your ideal answers. My favorite: “Describe a time a team member disagreed with you, and they turned out to be right. How did you handle the situation?” The final steps are all about what you should do during the actual interview itself.

More Must-Reads and Listens

• The right way to deliver bad earnings news.

• Our favorite management tips on learning from failure.

• Do your B2B customers see the value you deliver?

• Research on a counterintuitive way to get employees to use a benefit.

• Learn how people without formal power gain influence. (Our latest IdeaCast episode with Pamela Meyer, who wrote a recent magazine article on the topic.)

Finally, a little something for my fellow cycling fans (yes, I’m also watching this year’s particularly heartbreaking La Vuelta): A terrific article about collaboration and competition that also involves a metaphor about the peloton (plus some gorgeous Tour de France photos by Chris Auld). A hint at the article’s main message: “In the Tour, cyclists are constantly oscillating between two modes: collaboration when it makes the whole group stronger, and competition when differentiation decides the outcome.”

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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