Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi's credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We'd found a startup with a disruptive payments platform-one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup's codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers.
It's become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don't achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change-including synaptic, network and cost effects-that lead to resistance. Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies.
It's early 2025 and inside Equitable Holdings, CEO Mark Pearson is asking a simple but profound question: is 80% enough? Over the past three years, the company has undergone a sweeping transformation and launched a bold experiment to reinvent how a 160-year-old financial institution collaborates, innovates, and leads. This New Way of Working is designed to speed up decision-making, empower teams, and ignite a new culture of agility.
No statement can change the disappointment of the past several seasons. I know we have fallen short of the standard you expect and we as an organization have for ourselves. That responsibility rests with me. When results do not match expectations over time, as the owner, accountability cannot be shared or softened. I believe this team should be competing at a higher level than it has, and I share your deep frustration.
After 20 years inside some of the world's most iconic companies, the moment I stepped out, what both sides were missing became unmistakably clear. As an executive, pitches never stop. Everyone believes they've cracked your problem - they just need a moment of your time to prove it. Each conversation starts with the same confidence: that they've discovered a capability you were oblivious to, one that will unlock what your own organization somehow failed to see.
"There's so much that can go wrong," she told The Register. "From the beginning, we're talking with clients, and we're hearing a technology conversation without any type of business input, and that happened today. We're always steering clients back to the fact that this is business transformation. There needs to be executive sponsorship, there needs to be evidence that the organization is actually preparing itself for change - how they're going to operate - and not just replacing an application."
Yes, the Rockies acknowledged the Dodgers' place at the cutting edge of the new baseball with a nod to a 14-year-old movie about a 23-year-old season that ended in a first-round playoff loss. It did not take the worst team in baseball a full week to trump the best team in baseball with an equally jaw-dropping and equally on-brand moment, but you avert your eyes from Rockyball at your own peril.
