How Not to Transform Your Organization

Do not bring in celebrity CEOs or tech demigods expecting salvation. Their job is to extract value, convert resilience into quarterly numbers, and then leave before the smoke clears. The cycle is predictable: hype, short-term metrics, collapse. The organization becomes a ladder, not a habitat.

Transformation isn’t about flashy interventions or heroic (ie human, organisational) nodes. It’s about interdependence. Organizations, like ecosystems or political systems, do not exist in isolation. Every identity they claim—innovative, resilient, global—is performative, contingent on entangled exchanges with other systems. You cannot scale complexity with ego. You cannot lead with a mask.

Stop pretending your organization is a standalone entity. It never was. It was only ever a local intensification of global relational dynamics. Leadership that fails to understand this mistake ends up managing ghostships (and their discontents).