In a world of rapid change, enterprise transformations remain critical for meeting customer expectations and maintaining competitive advantage. 

Yet, research shows that approximately 70 percent of transformations fail. Digging deeper, this is largely due to execution deficiencies.

Further, in today's rapidly evolving business landscape—marked by AI-driven technological advancements, shifting customer expectations, and geopolitical instability—enterprise leaders face unprecedented complexity and uncertainty overall. 

To help businesses navigate these challenges, we recently participated in a PEX Network panel discussion that included highly respected leaders from some of the largest companies in the world. 

Ana Badell, the Senior Vice President for Global Enterprise Business Transformation at lululemon, and Alice Chi Martin, President of Global Merchandise Services at tms, and our own Vik Ashok, CEO of Graphite, joined the PEX Network Producer Francesca Dimeglio.

Here are the five key lessons the panelists shared during their engaging conversation.

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Lesson 1: Identify capabilities gaps at the outset

The first learning from the discussion was around capability gaps and strategies for closing them. The speakers noted that it’s common for enterprises undergoing transformations to discover they have significant disparities between what they’re attempting to accomplish and existing resources for leading or completing the necessary tasks.

“Transformations are a balance of what an enterprise says it wants to do, what it needs to do, and what it actually can do,” Badell said. “Further, what an enterprise is capable of doing usually exceeds what it wants and needs to do.”

This makes rigorously and fearlessly evaluating your talent capabilities a fundamental step for transformation success.

“It’s important to ask questions like ‘are we resourced the right way? do we have people that can help execute?’, Martin said. “You must have the right people in the seats.”

Fortunately, recent trends toward a more distributed workforce, remote work, and experienced talent increasingly joining the independent workforce make exceptional talent more readily and cost-effectively available.

“The historical way of acquiring talent was pretty binary—you had to either leverage your internal team or you had to call an expensive consulting firm that you might not be able to afford,” Ashok said. “Now there is a continuum or a spectrum of possibilities, making it easier for transformation leaders to leverage some of the amazing skills that are now available on the independent talent market.”

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Lesson 2: Injecting outside perspectives helps bridge the talent gaps

Although every enterprise has intelligent, energetic individuals who are eager to execute initiatives that improve business competitiveness, institutional expertise in planning and executing a transformation initiative is frequently lacking, according to the panelists. 

To address this challenge, the panelists recommended augmenting existing teams, including by engaging with external talent for short-term assignments.

“Don’t be too proud to ask for help, as good ideas come from everywhere,” said Martin. “External experts come in with a fresh perspective. They help you think about things differently.”

Badell echoed this sentiment. “Having a balance of internal operators and fresh new transformation professionals coming together makes transformations successful,” she said.

“Even if you’re starting from a great foundation, having a team that’s composed of existing talent peppered in with external talent is really important,” added Badell.

‍“Even if you’re starting from a great foundation, having a team that’s composed of existing talent peppered in with external talent is really important.” - Ana Badell, the Senior Vice President for Global Enterprise Business Transformation, lululemon

According to Ashok, this bears out across the enterprise spectrum, regardless of industry vertical. “We’ve seen independent talent provide the unique ability to come into an organization, challenge the thinking, change the way people look at a particular problem, and inject fresh ideas into an organization,” he said. “It’s a huge value creation area for enterprises and transformation leaders.”

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Lesson 3: Agility and adaptability are key

Taking a flexible and agile approach to designing and executing transformations was another point the panelists emphasized.

“It’s critical to have a transformation operating model and framework that’s agile,” said Badell. “Although ‘agile’ has become a buzzword, it’s true that you need the ability to easily flex with the times and company needs.”

In the context of talent agility, the panelists underlined the need to fill leadership and technical gaps quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale to maintain transformation momentum.

“Adaptability and agility are the name of the game,” Martin said. 

Utilizing on-demand independent experts to infuse talent agility is an advantageous strategy, according to the panelists. Among other benefits, engaging with independent experts enables designing transformation as a series of smaller bit-sized initiatives, ensuring that enterprises can plan, execute, and evolve their initiative as needs and circumstances require.

“Leveraging on-demand talent is enables our client companies to fill leadership and technical gaps quickly,” Ashok said. “This helps them maintain momentum and adapt in real time to stay super agile, continuously evolving without being constrained by internal limitations.”

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Lesson 4: Engaging with experienced change leaders and managers is key to success

As strong change management is another vital element for successful transformations, the panelists also discussed the benefits of augmenting internal resources with external change management experts.

“Having the right leaders is critical. If you don't have the right leaders to drive change, it's going to cause big problems out of the gate.” - Alice Chi Martin, President of Global Merchandise Services, tms

Although Badell noted it’s vital to develop in-house change management expertise over time, she also recommended engaging with external individuals to assist with the process.

“Depending on where you are in your transformation journey, you may need to bring in external talent temporarily to build up your change management capabilities,” she said.

Gaining experienced change leaders is another area where the availability of independent talent is fueling enterprise transformations in ways that were difficult, if not impossible, in the past. 

“The ability to cost-effectively and flexibly obtain top-tier consulting experience, accounting experience, and Fortune 500 experience is invaluable for the enterprises we work with,” Ashok says. “It’s an alternative to relying on the long-term consulting contracts that are under intense scrutiny and pressure right now.”

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Lesson 5: AI is a tool for facilitating transformations, not a fix

With AI top-of-mind at every enterprise, our panel also assessed how they see the impact of the technology on their respective roles. In a nutshell, they underscored that today’s AI capabilities can serve as a transformation adjunct but not a panacea.

“AI isn't going to fix your transformation issues, nor is it going to complete your transformation for you,” said Martin. “AI can help with process efficiency, like using it to get to market faster or mining talent to select the right independent experts for temporary roles.”

“In other words, AI is a tool to free up people’s time to do higher-value work, but it’s not a silver bullet.” - Alice Chi Martin, President of Global Merchandise Services, tms

Badell added that AI can be a component of an initiative, such as digital transformation, “but AI should support the larger enterprise goals of changing human behavior and mindset.”

One such supporting role is utilizing AI to identify the best independent talent for every circumstance rapidly. “We’ve long used AI to develop a matching engine that helps pinpoint the right person for complicated work from amongst a very heterogeneous pool of talent,” said Ashok. 

“Further, with the advent of generative AI, our platform is becoming even smarter about how it curates talent to match it with the opportunity at hand,” he added.

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Looking ahead to your transformation

From addressing capability gaps to engaging with the right change managers, agility and talent emerged as the overall watchwords for success as an enterprise embarks on a transformation journey.

For more on the topics noted in this blog and other significant insights our experts shared during the live discussion, we invite you to replay the webinar: Business transformation strategies to overcome execution hurdles in complex times.