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- Most Transformation Programs Fail for One Reason: They Make the Company Slower.
Most Transformation Programs Fail for One Reason: They Make the Company Slower.
Many organizations launch transformation initiatives to move faster. Ironically, that’s often what slows them down.
Glenda Carnate
June 09, 2026
Read time: 2.5 minutes
When a company is looking to improve its results, the common response is to incorporate additional components. New initiatives, new frameworks, new committees, new dashboards… every addition brings added complexity, and complexity will always slow down your business.
Take, for example, the organization that implements a major transformation program to increase the speed at which it operates. Six months into the program, they have more meetings, approvals, reports, and stakeholders than they did when they started. Clearly, the organization is evolving… it's just doing so at a slower pace than process optimization.
What High-Performing Organizations Understand About Change
1. The Goal of Business Performance isn't Transformation
Customers value results, not how many initiatives a company has underway.
2. Having More Initiatives Does not Equal More Progress
Each initiative competes for attention, resources, and the ability to be executed.
3. The Complexity of New Initiatives Makes it More Difficult to Change
Adding processes, approvals, and governance layers adds friction to the decision-making process; the more layers of governance a company adds, the longer it will take to make a decision.
4. Removing Before Adding is Often How to Get the Fastest Gains
Most of the fastest gains come from eliminating unnecessary meetings, reports, handoffs and bureaucracy.
5. The Ultimate Competitive Advantage is Speed
Strategies can be duplicated, and technology can be purchased. However, speed is not easily duplicated.
6. The Companies That Learn Fast Will Win
Companies that learn, adapt, and execute quickly will outperform those that spend several months debating every decision.
7. The Goal of a Company’s Transformation Should Be to Increase the Company’s Velocity
If a company does not become faster as part of its transformation, it is creating more work than value.
💡Key Takeaway:
The key to transforming your organization is to identify ways to remove barriers to execution rather than launching more programs to facilitate it.
The best organizations are not always the ones with the largest budgets, newest technologies, or the most audacious strategies… they are the organizations that learn the quickest, decide the fastest, and execute more quickly than they did yesterday.
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