Most corporate transformations fail because no one agrees on a plan. Pandora did

Most corporate transformations fail because executives never truly agree on a plan. The fix is forcing disagreement into the open before executing

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In the spring of 2019, Alexander Lacik arrived as CEO of Pandora to find a transformation already underway. The plan, called Programme Now, included a cost-reduction program, a brand relaunch, a digital marketing rebuild, and a go-to-market overhaul.

It looked complete. What it lacked was agreement.

When Lacik surveyed what his management team was actually working on, he found 46 priorities. A typical management team can execute three or four well. He convened a two-day off-site and cut the list to 12. For the first time, everyone was working toward the same thing.

The low odds of organizational change

For decades, the odds of a successful organizational transformation have remained stubbornly low. Boston Consulting Group studied nearly 2,000 public companies that tried to turn around declining performance and found that most failed to outperform their industry peers not only in the year after the downturn but over the next five. McKinsey's Global Survey told the same story from inside organizations: fewer than one in three respondents whose companies had been through a transformation said it succeeded at both improving performance and holding those gains. In an era when organizations digitized entire economies and mapped the human genome, no one found a way to make large-scale change work.

Julia Dhar, a managing director at BCG and founder of its Behavioral Science Lab,........

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