Leadership that makes room for change.
Every January comes with a promise: this will be the year businesses finally change. Better technology, better use of data, happier customers. The promise is attractive. It also sounds remarkably similar to last year's.
My view is that the biggest opportunity in 2019 sits with leadership. A company can buy a new platform quickly. Changing how it makes decisions, rewards people and learns from customers takes more deliberate work.
The cost of protecting the current business
A manager who is measured only on this quarter's results has a good reason to postpone an experiment whose value may appear next year. A team that needs permission from five departments will choose the safe improvement. These are predictable responses to the organisation leaders have built.
Calling for innovation does little if the budget, calendar and promotion criteria still reward business as usual. Leaders need to make room for work whose outcome is uncertain, then insist that the team learns something useful from it.
Start with one customer problem
Choose an experience that customers already find frustrating: repeating information, waiting for a decision or chasing an update. Follow that experience across departments. Find the point where responsibility becomes unclear, and give one person the authority to resolve it.
The technology decision should follow that investigation. A CRM can help people share customer context. Automation can remove a repetitive handover. Neither will settle a disagreement about who owns the outcome.
What I would ask the leadership team
Which customer problem will we make measurably smaller this quarter? Who can make the necessary decisions? What work will we stop to create capacity? And what evidence would persuade us to change direction?
Those questions are less exciting than a prediction about the next disruptive technology. They are also harder to evade. A small experiment with a clear owner, a real customer and an honest review can teach the business more than another presentation about transformation.
The next big thing in 2019 could be a leadership team that follows through. Start there.
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Annual series edition: 5 January. This edition was prepared or revised on 8 September 2026.
