Turning Stuff Around

A blog about the grit, grind, and occasional glory of turnarounds.

Tag: organizational culture

  • The Rise of the One-Person Value Factory

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    The Rise of the One-Person Value Factory

    For years, companies have tried to solve the same organizational problem: how do you reduce friction, remove bureaucracy, and get valuable work into the hands of customers faster?

    Amazon had the two-pizza team: no team should be so large that two pizzas could not feed it. Then came the idea of single-threaded teams: one team, one mission, one leader, one clear problem to solve. Netflix and others pushed versions of pods, squads, and cross-functional cells.

    The names differ, but the intent is the same: smaller teams have fewer handoffs, fewer dependencies, and less room for responsibility to disappear into the group. Companies keep trying to create smaller units of execution because big organizations naturally create drag. Anyone who has worked inside a large company knows how this happens. Product sits in one place. Engineering sits somewhere else. Data has its own queue. Legal needs to review. Marketing needs a brief. Finance needs a business case. Leadership needs alignment. By the time an idea becomes something a customer can actually touch, half the energy has leaked out of the system.

    AI changes the shape of this problem.

    AI makes existing teams more productive. That is true, but it is probably the least interesting part. The bigger shift is that AI allows one capable person to do work that previously required a small team. One person can research a market, analyze customer feedback, draft a product concept, build a prototype, test it, review results, and iterate. Not perfectly. Not always. Not in every domain. But well enough and often enough, that the unit of value creation inside companies is going to shrink again: From department, to team, to squad, to pod, and now, in some cases, to one person.

    This is the rise of the One-Person Value Factory.

    By that, I do not mean a freelancer inside the company. I also do not mean a heroic individual bypassing the organization, or someone doing ten jobs badly. A One-Person Value Factory is a person with enough context, judgment, tools, and authority to take a problem from insight to shipped value with minimal dependency on the machinery around them (the key phrase being shipped value).

    AI is going to create a lot of activity that looks like progress: More documents, more analysis, more dashboards, more content. But none of that matters unless it reaches a customer, improves the business, removes friction, saves money, creates revenue, or changes behavior. The One-Person Value Factory is not measured by how much it produces. It is measured by how quickly it turns ambiguity into useful output.

    That has real implications for organizational design. The old model assumes that execution requires coordination across specialties. The One-Person Value Factory model will increasingly assume that execution starts with autonomous value creators, supported by specialists only when needed. Instead of assembling a team around every idea, companies will ask a different question: can one strong operator take this far enough before we involve the machine?

    This is where management will need to change. Managers will not just allocate people to projects. They will need to decide where autonomy is safe, where synchronization is necessary, and where control is slowing the company down. And this is where the hard part begins.

    AI reduces production friction. It does not remove organizational friction. In fact, it may make synchronization harder. If ten people can each move five times faster, the organization does not automatically become fifty times faster. It may simply become ten fast-moving parts creating confusion in parallel. That confusion can show up as duplicate work, inconsistent customer messages, conflicting experiments, brand drift, security gaps, compliance risk, and customizations that do not add up to company progress. The bottleneck will move: It used to be production, increasingly, it will be synchronization.

    I believe this to be the next organizational challenge. How do you let One-Person Value Factories move fast without turning the company into a bag of disconnected experiments? You certainly don’t slow them down. The answer is to be much clearer on the few things that must be synchronized. Strategy must be synchronized, so people know which problems matter. Standards must be synchronized, so people understand the guardrails around architecture, quality, risk, data, compliance, and brand. Customer experience must be synchronized, so the company does not feel like a collection of unrelated products.

    But the work itself should not be over-synchronized. In my opinion, this is where many companies will get it wrong. They will see the risk of AI-enabled autonomy and respond with committees, approval flows, and more governance. They will take a technology that can compress weeks into days and wrap it in a process that turns days back into weeks, if not months. They will take the Lamborghini and hitch it to a horse-drawn carriage.

    We are living through an era where time has become even less neutral. Decisions require movement before everyone is comfortable. They require fast diagnosis, fast action, fast feedback, and fast correction. You do not get to wait until the structure is perfect. You need traction while the structure is still messy. That makes the One-Person Value Factory especially powerful.

    The question becomes: who in the organization can be trusted to own a problem end to end?

    Those people will become disproportionately valuable. Not because they “know how to use AI.” That will become table stakes. They will be valuable because they combine business judgment, customer understanding, execution discipline, and enough technical fluency to move without constant translation.

    The organizational question is no longer only “how do we build better teams?” It is also “how do we design a company where one person can create meaningful value without being trapped by the machinery around them?”

    That is not a small shift.

    The company of the future may still have teams, pods, functions, and leaders. But the atomic unit of progress will get smaller. And in many cases, it will be one person with context, judgment, AI leverage, and permission to move.

    That is the One-Person Value Factory: not a person doing everything, but a person able to move value through the system before the system slows it down.

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  • You Don’t Have a Priority Problem. You Have a Consequence Problem

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    You Don’t Have a Priority Problem. You Have a Consequence Problem

    One of the more frustrating things about struggling businesses is that they are rarely confused about what matters.

    Ask almost any executive team in a turnaround what the top priorities are and you will usually get a fast, polished answer. They will tell you the business needs to restore growth, improve cash discipline, tighten execution, stabilize delivery, retain customers, or rebuild margins. In most cases, they are not wrong. The problem is that those priorities too often live only in decks, town halls, and leadership conversations. And once the meeting ends, the system tells a different story.

    What you will find many times is that targets are missed. Deliverables slip. Owners come back the following week with explanations, context, and reasons why things did not move as expected. Everyone nods, the item rolls forward, and the business carries on.

    That pattern repeats for weeks or months. At some point leadership starts asking why the organization is not aligned, why urgency is not landing, or why nothing seems to stick. And usually the answer is simpler than they want it to be:

    It’s not a priorities problem, it’s a consequences problem.

    In troubled companies, this distinction matters a lot. Priorities without consequence are just aspirations. They may sound serious, but the organization quickly learns that failing to deliver against them does not materially change anything. And once people learn that, the words coming from the top lose weight.

    That is why I have become increasingly skeptical when leadership teams insist that the issue is a lack of clarity. Most of the time, there is plenty of clarity. What is missing are the mechanisms that make clarity matter.

    You can see this very clearly in weekly operating reviews. The same issues keep showing up. Pipeline quality is not where it should be. A product milestone has slipped again. A major initiative is blocked. On paper, these things are treated as critical. In practice, they are handled as discussion topics. The person responsible explains what happened, leadership asks a few questions, and everyone moves on. Nothing changes in ownership, nothing changes in oversight, and nothing changes in the level of scrutiny. So the organization takes the hint. These priorities may be important in theory, but they are not important enough to trigger action when missed.

    That is a dangerous place for any company to be. In a turnaround, it is lethal.

    Part of the reason this happens is that many leaders misunderstand consequence. They hear the word and think punishment. They think it means public humiliation, aggressive confrontation, or firing people at the first miss.

    It doesn’t.

    Good consequence is not theatrical and it is not emotional. It is structured, visible, and predictable. It simply means that when commitments are not met, something changes. The miss is acknowledged clearly, the reason is diagnosed, and the response is concrete. Oversight increases. Scope narrows. Resources are reallocated. Ownership is reconsidered. The system shows that commitments have weight.

    That is all consequence really is: proof that the business means what it says.

    Without that proof, priorities drift into the realm of corporate theater. Everyone learns the language of urgency, but nobody changes behavior. Leaders start repeating themselves more forcefully, hoping intensity will compensate for the lack of follow-through. It never does. Repetition without consequence only teaches the organization to wait out management’s latest concern.

    This is where turnarounds often stall. Not because the strategy is unclear. Not because people are lazy. But because the operating environment allows underperformance to pass through without enough friction. The business keeps talking about the right things, but it does not create enough pressure behind them to alter outcomes.

    The CEO’s role here is bigger than many realize. In the end, consequence is a leadership choice. It is set in real time, in the moment when someone reports a miss. If the response is vague, overly sympathetic, or endlessly deferential to circumstances, the standard drops. If repeated misses are tolerated without any structural response, the organization notices. Very quickly, people understand whether targets are real or just decorative.

    That is why consistency matters so much. Consequence cannot depend on mood, politics, or who is in the room. If one executive is challenged hard while another is allowed to slide, credibility disappears. Once that happens, accountability starts to feel selective, and the whole thing degrades into politics. The only version that works is the one that is consistent enough to become part of the operating fabric of the company.

    When that starts happening, the culture changes surprisingly fast. Meetings become sharper. Language gets more precise. People escalate problems earlier because they know slippage matters. Ownership becomes clearer because ambiguity is no longer safe. Not everyone likes this shift, of course. It creates discomfort. It exposes capability gaps. It forces harder calls on people who may have been protected by vagueness for too long. But that discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. In many turnarounds, it is the first sign that the system is becoming honest.

    And honesty is a prerequisite for recovery.

    A business cannot improve performance until it is willing to face performance plainly. Not with drama, and not with blame, but with enough seriousness that people understand results are not optional. That is the piece many leadership teams skip. They spend time trying to perfect the message, refine the priorities, or sharpen the narrative, when what the organization really needs is evidence that missed commitments will no longer dissolve into polite discussion.

    So if you are sitting in a business that keeps talking about focus, urgency, and alignment, but the same issues keep resurfacing week after week, do not start by rewriting the priorities again. Start by asking a more uncomfortable question: what actually happens here when someone does not deliver?

    That answer will tell you far more about the health of the turnaround than any strategy deck ever will.

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  • Tenure: A Double-edged Sword

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    Tenure: A Double-edged Sword

    Every organization has its ‘village elders’—those long-tenured employees who have been with the company for 10, 15, 20 years (or more!) Their tenure brings a wealth of knowledge, deep trust, and a sense of solidity that can anchor an organization. But what happens when that anchor becomes a weight that holds it back?

    Edge 1: The “Bad“

    Tenure has a tendency to breed stagnation. Over time, tenured employees can develop a resistance to change as they try and keep things “as they’ve always been”. This mindset defaults to the known and familiar, while pushing back on the new and riskier. Fresh ideas may be dismissed too quickly, stifling innovation and fostering a culture of complacency.

    It’s easy to picture this: an aspiring young developer consults a tenured principal. She demos something new, something innovative, only to be advised to use the existing tech. “We’ve always done things this way” she hears. The fire dies out. The idea is lost.

    Edge 2: The “Good”

    But tenure isn’t all bad. Just as it can stifle progress, it can also be one of your greatest assets.

    Beyond being beacons of trust and continuity, tenured employees are also incredible sources of historical knowledge. These individuals often hold key insights that can help you avoid repeating past mistakes. They’ve been-there-done-that, and can provide a historical lens into what’s worked and what hasn’t for the company. Their institutional memory can serve as a safeguard, offering advice that could prevent you from unknowingly stepping onto the same landmines of the past.

    The Turnaround Context

    In a turnaround, both “edges” can make or break your efforts. On the one hand, a turnaround demands agility, fresh thinking, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. On the other, not learning from past mistakes and avoiding known pitfalls can be very costly—almost detrimental—to creating the trust and momentum needed.

    So, should tenure be curbed or promoted? The answer is both! And the key is balance.

    Maintaining the Balance

    Maintaining the balance is not as complex as you may think. First, you will need a good measure of the tenure ratio which, as its name suggests, measures the proportion of tenured people within a given group (a team, a division, or the entire company.) Start by defining the number of years that constitute tenure for your company (this varies by company size, industry, and the organization’s current growth stage). Once defined, measuring the ratio is straight forward:
    For the purpose of the exercise, let’s assume that tenure is reached after 4 years. Now consider a team of 12 developers, of which 7 have been with the company for over 4 years. Your tenure ratio for this team is therefore 60%, indicating a strong concentration of long-tenured employees.

    Applying this calculation to the rest of your teams, gives you a clear picture of tenure concentrations throughout your organization. And from there you can plan your balancing initiatives. Here are a few of those initiatives that have helped me in these situations:

    • Reassign individuals: balance tenure across teams
      The benefits of this are obvious: under-tenured teams enjoy an injection of expertise, and tenured teams are exposed to fresh ways of thinking and new perspectives. The challenge with this initiative is, well, that tenured people resist change (and moving desks), so this needs to be managed carefully.
    • Realign work: mirror tenure with subject matter
      Alternatively to reassigning tenured members, encourage them to become subject-matter experts of critical systems and shift their focus to maintaining them. While maintaining systems may seem mundane, it often involves complex technical challenges that benefit from the expertise of tenured employees. Furthermore, it indirectly supports innovation by giving the rest of the team the room to move faster on other newer initiatives.
    • Reprocess for ideas: purposefully enable fresh perspectives
      Beyond reassigning individuals, and realigning work, be sure to implement processes that encourage questioning of the status quo, exploring new ideas, and overseeing their implementation. Though the initial reaction to the words “process” and “innovation” appearing in the same sentence is often an eye-roll, when they enable individuals to speak up about new ideas and ways of doing things—and be heard—they are good! Especially in more tenured organizations that may require that foundation to break the default thought cycles.

    Tenured employees can be your greatest allies or your biggest roadblocks, depending on how you engage them. Consulting them early and often helps you leverage their wisdom while avoiding past pitfalls. With that in mind, leadership plays a crucial role in balancing tenure. By fostering a culture of collaboration and openness, leaders can ensure that tenured employees feel valued while encouraging innovation and adaptability. The goal isn’t to sideline or discredit their experience but to channel it in ways that drive progress and enable your goals.

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  • The “Work-From-Where?” Conundrum

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    The “Work-From-Where?” Conundrum

    The ongoing debate over remote work versus in-office has grown louder recently, with major corporations mandating a full-time return to office. Amazon, for example, is mandating a full-time return to the office starting in January, citing the benefits of in-person collaboration. Conversely, many employees and organizations advocate for the benefits of remote work, which offers access to a broader talent pool for employers, and flexibility, autonomy, and improved work-life balance for team members.

    Both models have pros and cons. So, what is the “right” approach? And given a turnaround situation, should a full-time work-from-office be mandated? The answer is: it depends.

    The success of any work model—remote, hybrid, or in-office—largely depends on one critical, defining factor: your organization’s culture. An organization’s culture is its DNA. It shapes how teams work, communicate, and innovate. Some cultures thrive on the energy of in-person brainstorming sessions, and the spontaneous “water cooler” chats. Others excel in an environment where flexibility reigns, and employees are trusted to deliver from wherever they’re most productive. In geographically dispersed organizations, you’ll often find micro-cultures that have their own idiosyncrasies: the team in Europe is different than the team in Latin America, and both are different than the team in Asia. Some teams prefer working from the office, while others enjoy a hybrid model.

    In a turnaround, culture becomes even more critical (though, I’d argue that culture is always critical, not just during a turnaround.) You’re not only trying to implement a work model; you’re trying to rebuild trust, create alignment, and drive collaboration and momentum. And remember, the organization you’re working to fix already has an established culture—the slate isn’t blank. In weighing the pros and cons of each model, you should consider how each approach will affect the culture (and in-turn — the bigger goals you’ve set.)

    At my company we opted for a hybrid model: three days in the office, two at home (we didn’t allow a work-from-anywhere model). And we were open to exceptions in different geographies. This worked well for both the business and the teams as we were able to align needs and requirements across our global operation. This included calling a full-time work-from-office when needed. (By the way, some teams chose themselves to work full-time in the office!)

    So what’s right for your organization? The question isn’t only about productivity—it’s about how the work model will influence, shape and evolve the organization’s culture. And, most importantly, whether that changed culture enables your goals and long-term plans. Ultimately, a successful turnaround depends on finding a model that creates a culture to help you deliver on your mission.

    Engage your team, listen to their needs, and tailor your approach accordingly. The right work model isn’t about following trends or making sweeping mandates—it’s about aligning your strategy with your people and enabling their success (which is ultimately yours).

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