What It Looks Like

If You Are the CEO

The executive mandate without which the structural corrections described in this book are impossible. What the transition requires, what to protect, and four conditions under which you should not attempt it.

The preceding chapters described a structural condition and the changes it requires. This section addresses the executive mandate that makes those changes possible, because the structural corrections described in Parts VII and VIII require something no amount of engineering capability can substitute for: sustained executive commitment.

If you have read this far, you have recognised something. Perhaps not every chapter, but enough of them. The meetings that produce agreement without understanding. The strategy deck that grows longer as contact with reality diminishes. The transformation programme that produced governance infrastructure rather than structural change. The engineer who left because the architecture would produce the same cascade with the next regulatory change and the organisation had no intention of repairing it.

The CEO in the opening chapter approved the consultants' recommendations because no concrete alternatives had been presented for consideration. Parts VII and VIII are the alternative.

Believe the diagnosis, not because this book makes it, but because your own organisation has been telling you for years.

The engineer who said the architecture does not support the strategy was right. The architect who said the reference model describes nothing real was right. The CTO who told you the legacy systems are harder to untangle than expected was describing the consequence of a structural split she did not create and cannot repair without your authorisation.

If you commissioned an external review and it recommended better alignment, a new operating model, a governance framework, recognise that recommendation for what it is: the most expensive answer your advisors could sell that did not require changing the structure. The diagnosis was accurate. The remedy was designed to be absorbable by the conditions that produced the problem.

The dysfunction is a design choice made over more than a decade, in which software became the primary medium of value creation while the governance structures remained where they were. The technology changed. The power structures did not. The misalignment has been compounding since the early 2010s.

You cannot fix this by hiring better people, buying better tools, or commissioning another transformation programme. The people are already good. The tools are already available. The programmes have already been run. What has not changed is the structure of authority, ownership, and accountability that determines how all three are used. The transition described in the preceding chapters will eliminate roles, reduce coordination, and redistribute authority. This must be stated plainly, because every previous structural proposal has been presented as additive (we will add a new layer, a new framework, a new governance forum) and this one is not.

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See also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions in the Boardroom