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Around 70% of large-scale corporate transformation efforts fail. That figure has remained consistent for 25 yearsand it comes from an era of relatively manageable change. Artificial intelligence will demand far more of companies: faster adaptation, more comprehensive reinvention, and continuous evolution rather than periodic adjustment. Yet more than three years after the launch of ChatGPT, only 5% of businesses report extracting significant value from their AI initiatives. If companies struggled with transformation before, the coming years will be harder still. Managing rapid change is becoming the central competency for business leadership. Every serious observer agrees that executives need to develop new skills and mindsets to navigate what is coming. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of corporate America’s response. In a recent survey of leaders at large organizations, the Center for Creative Leadership found that 82% believed leadership development offers a competitive advantage amid economic uncertainty, and 72% said that cutting development budgets would create significant challenges. Yet 71% expected those budgets to be reduced in the event of any downturn. How can leaders simultaneously believe that executive development is essential while treating it as expendable? The answer isnt confusion or hypocrisy. It is that businesses have lost faith in the solutions on offer. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} The Problems With Traditional Approaches And rightly so. Traditionally, companies have turned to executive education programs to help guide them through change. But most of these programs tend to focus on information transfersharing research findings without showing how to apply them to the specific realities of an individual business. The work of translation falls entirely on the leadership team. At the same time, much of the research informing these programs is backward-looking. Foundational studies may have been conducted two, three, or even more years ago. That cadence just cant keep pace with the speed at which AI is reshaping competitive landscapes. The classic consulting model does not fare any better. Whether providing leadership coaching or conducting transformation work directly, these engagements are expensive and the results they deliver are unreliable. More fundamentally, the pace of change ahead makes it simply unfeasible to bring in external teams to reshape the organization every time an advance in AI tech delivers paradigm-shifting capabilities. This approach is not sustainable financially, operationally, or culturally. The Resources Are Already There At present, most companies see organizational change as something rare that needs to be handled episodically. As a result, they lack the embedded processes that enable continuous innovation and transformation. They invest in a leadership program here and an external engagement there without ever establishing the permanent mechanisms that can capture value from new developments on an ongoing basis. This means that every disruption must be addressed from scratch, as if the organization had learned nothing from the last one. Instead of looking outward, corporations should be making the most of the resources they already have. Most companies employ extremely capable leaders who understand how their organizations actually work far better than any outside advisor could hope to. I have seen this repeatedly in the more than thirty years I have spent leading transformation initiatives at major corporations and government agencies. The talent and the institutional knowledge are already therethey just need to be unlocked. What is missing is not capability. It is a repeatable management systemand a spark. Repeatable Management Systems If the internal resources are already there, why aren’t companies already building these management systems on their own? The answer is that potential is not the same as momentum. Most organizations need something to break through the inertiaa catalyst that disrupts established patterns and creates the conditions for change to take hold. This is where outside expertise remains essential. But the nature of that expertise must change. The goal is not to perform the transformation work on the organization’s behalf. It is to provide the spark that sets internal capabilities in motion: diagnosing the current state, establishing the right frameworks, and building the confidence that allows leadership teams to take ownership of what comes next. Think of it as the difference between hiring someone to drive your car and hiring an instructor who teaches you to drive yourself. Both involve external help. But only one leaves you with a capability you can use forever. The key is establishing repeatable management systems that can be applied consistently across different challenges. When transformation processes are repeatable, each new disruption becomes an occasion to deploy proven methods rather than an emergency that demands improvisation from scratch. Building repeatable management systems is not a matter of snapping one’s fingers. But all the core ingredients exist within most large organizations. Outside partners can help establish the frameworks and get things moving in the right direction. But once an organization has built the engine to manage its ongoing evolution, it should not have to keep returning to the well again and again. The Compounding Advantage Businesses cannot afford to keep approaching change in the same way they have for decades. It has not worked well historically, and it will work even less well in the years ahead. The companies that thrive will be those that stop waiting for external partners to perform transformation on their behalf and start building the internal systems that make continuous adaptation part of how they operate. The organizations that get this right first will build a compounding advantage. Once the spark has been provided and the engine is running, each successive change becomes easier. The organization leans from one transformation and applies those lessons to the next. Meanwhile, competitors who remain locked in cycles of episodic external intervention will struggle to keep pace with technological shifts that arrive faster than any outside partner can respond to. Five Steps to Unlock Your Internal Transformation Capability Recognize that the capability already exists. Stop assuming that transformation requires importing talent or expertise your organization lacks. Audit the skills, institutional knowledge, and leadership capacity you already have. The gap is rarely capabilityit is the management systems and confidence needed to channel that capability toward change. Seek sparks, not ongoing support. When you bring in outside help, structure engagements around ignition, not dependency. The right external partner diagnoses your current state, establishes frameworks, and builds internal confidencethen steps back. The measure of their success is whether your organization can manage the next transformation on its own. Establish permanent change infrastructure. Create the internal systems, frameworks, and repeatable processes that will allow your organization to manage continuous evolution. This includes clear decision-rights for transformational initiatives, standardized methodologies for workflow redesign, and protocols for evaluating and deploying new capabilities. The goal is to make transformation a core organizational competence rather than an occasional intervention. Move transformation ownership to the CEO. Stop treating leadership development and organizational change as HR functions or IT projects. When the chief executive owns the transformation strategy, it becomes integrated with business objectives rather than running parallel to them. Development initiatives should be evaluated against strategic outcomes, not training completion rates. Build learning loops into every change. The compounding advantage comes from treating each transformation as an opportunity to strengthen your capacity for the next one. After every significant change initiative, capture what worked, what failed, and what you would do differently. Feed those lessons back into your frameworks and processes so the organization genuinely learns rather than simply moves on. The age of AI demands a new approach to how organizations change. The old modelswhether executive education or traditional consultingserved a slower world. That world is gone. The companies that will lead in the years ahead will not be those that find the best external partners to perform transformation for them. They will be those that find the right spark to unlock the transformation capability they already possess. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
A college degree is usually thought of as a ticket to a great job and a secure future. Yet, the job market over the past few years has not been kind to graduates. Rapid changes in technology and uncertainty about the influence of AI on the economy have made it harder for companies to know what their new employees need to know to be successful. I have argued in the past that this uncertainty actually makes college degrees more useful than ever, but higher education is doing a poor job of helping students navigate this uncertainty. Sadly, universities arent going to fix this problem by hiring more career counselors. Instead, theyre going to have to do the hard work of restructuring their teaching mission for the 21st century. As it turns out, there is a straightforward (if labor-intensive) way for higher ed to make graduates (and continuing education students) more future-proof: focusing on teaching students durable skills, that will see them through the future; tying assessments to outcomes; and tracking competencies rather than courses. I believe so deeply that this change must be made, that I have left my role as a university professor and administrator after 27 years to work for Minerva Project, a company that built Minerva University, a private university, from the ground up using this approach and now brings it to schools around the world interested in reform. Here’s what this looks like: 1. Focus on durable skills Most college graduates credit their degree programs with helping them to become better learners, communicators, and thinkers regardless of their major. Indeed, liberal arts degree holders may struggle to get jobs initially, but they are quite successful in the long run. These degree programs provide value, because they ultimately teach durable skills. A skill is durable when it can be applied usefully in many different settings. Someone who learns to use a particular computer programming language has a potentially valuable skill. But, if the industry changes the standard for the language being used, or if AI can do a lot of the coding that companies need, then this skill loses value. Someone who learns the more durable skill of characterizing a problem and framing the path to a solution can continue to play a role even if much of the work to implement that solution can be automated. Universities are in the business of teaching these durable skills. Students learn key competencies like characterizing a problem, engaging in systems thinking, and communicating that problem and solution to others. Unfortunately, this teaching is done unsystematically in a way that can make it hard for some students to truly achieve competence in these deep skills and makes it difficult for graduates to articulate what they have learned. The solution is for institutions to align on a framework to characterize the core set of skills they deliver. This framework benefits employers, faculty, and students. Employers get a clear statement of what graduates have learned. Faculty get a common language for talking about these skills so that they can call them out explicitly to students in classes. Students then have a better understanding of the skills they are learning. That enables them to be strategic about selecting classes that will help them to solidify key abilities and provides them with a vocabulary for talking to employers about what they will bring to their work. In order for this approach to be successful, though, faculty need to provide students with authentic assessments and students need some kind of record to track their expertise. 2. Authentic assessment Just talking about the skills that are (somehow) being taught in higher education is not enough. Students need evidence of their progress toward gaining competence in these durable skills. Unfortunately, when students take an exam or do an assignment, the most visible result of that work is a grade. A professor (or teaching assistant) may write comments on the work, but the student tends to focus on whether they got an A. Authentic assessment happens when each assignment is related directly to outcomes that the course is designed to develop. Students should be aware of the relationship between these assignments and the outcomes. More importantly, assignments need to be evaluated by using a measure (a rubric) that relates the students work to the skill being practiced. In this way, the feedback students get on their work is focused on what the exam or assignment says about their current proficiency rather than on the number or letter at the top of the page. While this wont get rid of grades altogether, it does provide prospective employers with a way to emphasize the skills they believe signal success, which is a recipe for changing the focus of students from grades to competency. While it might seem obvious that authentic assessment is crucial to good education, most college faculty are not trained as educators, and so their assignments (and bases for grading) are often disconnected from the desired learning outcomes for students. Universities need to provide more support for faculty to improve the quality of their assignments and grading rubrics. Authentic assessments change the focus of a students work from achieving a grade to developing competence. That focus can motivate students to put in the effort to improve. As a result, students are not trying to game the system to get a good grade. Instead, they are looking for opportunities to expand their skills. This approach also provides a guard against academic misconduct. After all, what is the point of cheating on an assignment if the sole purpose of the work is to help you get better and understand your skills? 3. A competency tracker, not a transcript Part of what obscures the value of a degree for students and employers is that the primary record a student gets of their time in college is a transcript. Transcripts are just lists of courses (whose names dont provide much information about their content) and grades (that provide a blunt assessment of how students performed). Indeed, few people ever look at a graduates transcript, because the entries on it dont say much about what that person can do. The alternative is to build a record of student performance around the institutions framework for durable skills that accumulates the evidence from the many assignments students have done that teach and assess these skills. This tracker provides students with a current snapshot of what they do (and do not) do well. The record itself links back to past assignments. This tracker enables students to look back at past work to see the growing complexity of their thinking. Anyone who has looked back with some horror at a paper they wrote in their first year of college can recognize the improvements in their communication ability and complexity of thought. This record systematizes that experience. It also enables students to clearly articulatetheir skills to employers. In addition, over the course of a career, maintaining a competence tracker can signal to someone that it is time to get some more education to stay a step ahead of economic and technological changes. Higher education must make these changes . . . now in order to equip students for the future. It is up to all of us who care about colleges and universities to push them to do so.
Category:
E-Commerce
February is here. The “New Year, New Me” energy has officially worn off, replaced by a much more realistic “New Year, Same Me, But Freezing” thanks to a very disrespectful wind chill a heating bill thats starting to look like a phone number. But we live in the future! We have technology! Here are six actually useful gadgets thatll keep you toasty without burning up a ton of cash. Rechargeable Hand Warmers (~$20) Disposable hand warmers are fine, but theyre wasteful and, frankly, kind of gross after a while. These rechargeable ones, on the other hand (pun intended), are basically big batteries that get hot. They charge via USB-C, include one cord that charges both at the same time, and offer three heat settings. They can be snapped together magnetically to form one mega-warmer or split apart to keep both pockets toasty. Coffee Mug Warmer (~$18) You made coffee. You got distracted by a Slack notification. Now you have sad, cold coffee. This coffee mug warmer isn’t new tech: in fact, its barely tech at all. Its a tiny hot plate for your desk that keeps your drink at a steady, drinkable temperature for hours. Is it fancy? No. Does it have an app? Thankfully, no. It just does one thingfight the laws of coolingand it does it well. No need to microwave your coffee like a savage. Bluetooth Beanie (~$16) You want to listen to a podcast while walking the dog, but your earbuds hurt your cold ears and your headphones won’t fit over your hat. The fix? A hat that sings to you. It solves the “earbuds vs. frostbite” dilemma nicely since the speakers are sewn right into the fabric, connecting to your phone via Bluetooth so you can listen to your favorite playlist while shoveling the driveway. The audio quality wont win any Grammys, but for 20 bucks, it keeps your noggin warm and your audio playing. It’s washable, too, provided you take the electronic bits out first. Smart Plug (~$9) The floor is freezing, and you have to get out of bed to turn on the space heater. Thats a problem. The solution is a smart plug that lets you control your “dumb” heater from your phone or smart speaker. “Alexa, turn on the Heater.” Thats it. You can also set a schedule so your drafty home office warms up 15 minutes before you sit down. Just make sure your heater has a mechanical switch (the clicky kind) so it really does turn on when the power cuts in. Heated Insoles (~$30) When youre standing outside, the ground is actively sucking the life force out of your feet. These insoles are literally tiny electric blankets for your shoes. Theres an app you can use to finesse the temperature, and full disclosure: each insole has its own battery pack that you wear around your ankle like a house-arrest monitor. But, hey: Its winter. Long pants season. And theyre “cut-to-fit,” meaning you just trim them with scissors to match your shoe size. Simple. Effective. Warm. Electric Plasma Lighter (~$10) Lighting a roaring fire for warmth and ambiance is annoying when the matches break or the lighter runs out of fluid. Enter the rechargeable lighter, which uses electricity to create a plasma arc. Its windproof, splash-proof, and makes a cool, crackle-y sci-fi noise. You plug it in to charge it, then press a button to create a tiny lightning bolt that sets things on fire. Its quite a conversation starter, and hopefully the last lighter youll ever need to buy.
Category:
E-Commerce
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