Change Management

If you live in the Mid-Atlantic region and don't know what PJM Interconnection is, pay attention. PJM was founded 99 years ago to manage the distribution of electricity over Pennsylania (P), New Jersey (J), and Maryland (M). Since then, the nonprofit company has expanded to include Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Washington DC, half of Kentucky, and significant parts of Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, and Illinois (including Chicago). It is the largest single power grid in the United States. Headquartered in Valley Forge, PA, PJM provides electricity to 67 million Americans. PJM coordinates the movement of electricity between all the different power companies within its service area, such as PECO in Philly, Delmarva Power in Delaware, and all the other power companies listed in the graph. PJM operates as a traffic cop for electricity generators, making sure that power plants (gas, coal, nuclear, etc.) operating in its service area are distributing electricity as needed across the entire grid so that no area goes without necessary power. Think of what air traffic controllers do at airports, guiding the planes in and out, making sure there is order and no mistakes, 24 hours a day. PJM does that with electricity. The problem is the rapid proliferation of AI data centers, particularly in Northern Virginia and Maryland (around DC) which is the most concentrated collection of data centers in the USA. These data centers just plug into the PJM grid and started sucking up power to the point that PJM is running nearly all the time at max capacity. If you live here and haven't felt the impact of electricity price increases, you will soon. Many power companies have price caps in place, but that won't last. In capacity auctions, where power resources commit to be available in years ahead, prices have gone parabolic; from $2.2B to $14B (a 536% increase), largely due to forecasted load growth from data centers. It's a challenge to generate a political solution with governors of both parties in the service area. Plus, the Trump Administration is now getting involved. The Energy Secretary and Interior Secretary hosted 13 state governors involved at the White House 1/16 where there was an agreement on 2 key principles: 1- Emergency Power Auction - the idea is to compel data centers to participate in financing new power plants by buying 15 years of power in advance. Data centers would bid for these contracts, hence the auction. 2- Price Caps - to shield the 67 million Americans from exponentially higher electric bills, it is proposed to cap electricity bills for 1-2 years. It is unclear who will absorb the risk and cost to make this happen. In many states price caps are already protecting Americans. If a solution can't be reached soon, it is increasingly likely that rolling blackouts will happen across the service area during high-load periods (extreme heat or extreme cold). Be prepared. #riskmanagement #interestrates #fedpolicy

China is electrifying its trucking fleet so fast that it’s now reshaping global diesel demand. This has not been widely covered by the mainstream media. Here's how quickly things have shifted: ➡️ 2020: Nearly every new truck in China was diesel ➡️ H1 2025: Battery-electric trucks hit 22% of new sales ➡️ 2026: expected to reach 60% – a majority share And what's driving this shift? Economics. Rapidly falling battery prices mean electric trucks are now cheaper to own and operate than diesel or LNG alternatives. Fleet operators are also increasingly adopting depot charging, opportunity charging and battery-swap networks – removing the last points of friction. And this matters: road freight accounts for around one third of all transport emissions. The impact on oil demand is already visible: ✅ China's electric trucks are already cutting oil demand by the equivalent of more than one million barrels a day. ✅ China's transport sector is forecast to use 40% less diesel in 2030 than in 2024. So why did analysts miss this? Most models assumed heavy trucks would be the last segment to electrify – but China moved faster on battery-swap infrastructure, ultra-cheap LFP batteries, and high-utilisation urban freight fleets than expected. The economics flipped earlier than the forecasts. The result: diesel demand in China – the world’s second-largest consumer – could fall much faster than many predicted. And that's not all. Already the world's largest exporter of passenger cars, China is now eyeing the global electric truck market. Adoption is growing in the Middle East and Latin America and BYD is building a new electric truck and bus factory in Hungary. This is just the beginning. #energy #renewables #energytransition

70% of change initiatives fail. (And it's rarely because the idea was bad.) Here's what actually kills transformation: You picked the wrong change model for the job. It's like performing surgery with a hammer. Sure, you're using a tool. But it's the wrong one. I've watched brilliant CEOs tank their companies this way: Using individual coaching (ADKAR) for company-wide transformation. Result: 200 people change. 2,000 don't. Running a massive 8-step program for a simple process fix. Result: 6 months wasted. Team exhausted. Nothing changes. Forcing top-down mandates when they needed subtle nudges. Result: Rebellion. Resentment. Resignation letters. Here's what nobody tells you about change: The size of your change determines your approach. Real examples from the field: 💡 Startup pivoting product: → Used Lewin's 3-stage (unfreeze old way, change, refreeze) → 3 months. Clean transition. Team aligned. 💡 Enterprise going digital: → Used Kotter's 8-step process → Created urgency first. Built coalition. Enabled action. → 18 months later: $50M in new revenue. 💡 Sales team adopting new CRM: → Used Nudge Theory → Made old system harder to access → Put new system as browser homepage → 95% adoption in 2 weeks. Zero complaints. The expensive truth: Wrong model = wasted months + burned budgets + broken trust Right model = faster adoption + sustained results + energized teams Warning signs you're using the wrong model: • High activity, low progress • People comply but don't commit • Changes revert within weeks • Energy drops as you push harder • "This too shall pass" becomes the motto Match your medicine to your ailment: Small behavior change? Nudge it. Individual performance? ADKAR it. Cultural shift? Influence it. Full transformation? Kotter it. Enterprise overhaul? BCG it. Stop treating every change like a nail. Start choosing the right tool for the job. Your next change initiative depends on it. Your team's trust demands it. Your company's future requires it. Save this. Share it with your leadership team. Because the next time someone says "people resist change," you'll know the truth: People don't resist change. They resist the wrong approach to change. P.S. Want a PDF of my Change Management cheat sheet? Get it free: https://lnkd.in/dv7biXUs ♻️ Repost to help a leader in your network. Follow Eric Partaker for more operational insights. — 📢 Want to lead like a world-class CEO? Join my FREE TRAINING: "The 8 Qualities That Separate World-Class CEOs From Everyone Else" Thu Jul 3rd, 12 noon Eastern / 5pm UK time https://lnkd.in/dy-6w_rx 📌 The CEO Accelerator starts July 23rd. 20+ Founders & CEOs have already enrolled. Learn more and apply: https://lnkd.in/dwndXMAk

For years, the biggest players in CPG and FMCG—Unilever, Nestlé, Kraft Heinz—built their empires on food. But now? They’re making a massive pivot..if you had told me 5 years ago that these brands would be pulling back from food, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. -Unilever is cutting loose its $8 billion ice cream division, choosing to focus on higher-margin beauty and wellness. -Nestlé is doubling down on health-science-based nutrition as food brands struggle with pricing power. - #CPG giants are seeing stronger growth in self-care, supplements, and skincare than in traditional food categories. The global personal care market is expected to hit $758 billion by 2030, while processed food growth slows. Why This Shift? 1. Margins in food are shrinking. Consumers are trading down, private labels are winning, and inflation-wary shoppers aren’t absorbing cost hikes like they used to. 2. Health & wellness are driving premiumization. Customers will pay more for skincare, supplements, and functional beverages—but not for basic pantry staples. 3. Brand loyalty in food is eroding. Over 50% of consumers are comfortable switching food brands based on price, but loyalty remains strong in beauty, healthcare, and wellness. Winning Brands Are Already Moving: -L'Oréal’s skincare division posted 9.1% revenue growth last year, while traditional CPG food brands saw single-digit declines. -The Coca-Cola Company is investing in functional drinks and non-carbonated wellness categories to stay relevant. -PepsiCo’s biggest success? Gatorade’s expansion into hydration and performance-based drinks, not soda. CPG Leaders: ✅ Stop thinking of food as the core driver of growth. Instead, align with evolving consumer behavior. ✅ Invest in personalization, self-care, and functional health. That’s where demand (and pricing power) is strongest. ✅ Rethink your brand mix. Is your portfolio weighted toward categories that will still be relevant in 5-10 years? So, here’s my question to FMCG execs: Are you future-proofing your brand strategy—or just managing decline? Let’s talk. #FMCG #CPG #ConsumerTrends #GrowthStrategy #Beauty #Wellness #RevenueShift #BrandEvolution "

Louder for the people at the back 🎤 Many organisations today seem to have shifted from being institutions that develop great talent to those that primarily seek ready-made talent. This trend overlooks the immense value of individuals who, despite lacking experience, possess a great attitude, commitment, and a team-oriented mindset. These qualities often outweigh the drawbacks of hiring experienced individuals with a fixed and toxic mindset. The best organisations attract talent with their best years ahead of them, focusing on potential rather than past achievements. Let’s be clear this is more about mindset and willingness to learn and unlearn as apposed to age. To realise the incredible potential return, organisations must commit to creating an environment where continuous development is possible. This requires a multi-faceted approach: 1. Robust Training Programmes: Employers should invest in comprehensive training programmes that equip employees with the necessary skills for their roles. This includes on-the-job training, mentorship programmes, online courses, and workshops. 2. Redefining Hiring Criteria: Organisations should revise their hiring criteria to focus more on candidates’ potential and willingness to learn rather than solely on prior experience or formal qualifications. Behavioural interviews, aptitude tests, and probationary periods can help assess a candidate's ability to learn and adapt. 3. Partnerships with Educational Institutions: Companies can collaborate with educational institutions to design curricula that align with industry needs. Apprenticeship programmes, internships, and cooperative education can bridge the gap between academic learning and practical job skills. 4. Lifelong Learning Culture: Encouraging a culture of lifelong learning within organisations is crucial. Employers should provide ongoing education opportunities and support for professional development. This includes continuous skills assessment and access to resources for upskilling and reskilling. 5. Inclusive Recruitment Practices: Employers should implement inclusive recruitment practices that remove biases and barriers. Blind recruitment, diversity quotas, and targeted outreach programmes can help ensure that diverse candidates are given a fair chance. By implementing these measures, organisations can develop a workforce that is adaptable, innovative, and resilient, ensuring sustainable success and growth.

A cheat code to unlock professional growth in 2024. The 4 Types of Professional Time: There are 4 types of professional time: 1. Management: Meetings, calls, emails, etc. 2. Creation: Writing, coding, building, preparing. 3. Consumption: Reading, listening, studying. 4. Ideation: Brainstorming, journaling, reflecting. To make improvements to your balance of time, first assess your starting point: Starting on a Monday, at the end of each weekday, color code the events from that day according to this key: • Red: Management • Green: Creation • Blue: Consumption • Yellow: Ideation At the end of the week, look at the overall mix of colors on the calendar. The image in this post is an illustrative example of how it might look. This simple exercise should give you a clear picture of your current baseline mix of professional time. With your baseline mix in mind, here are three tips for a more optimal balance: 1. Batch Management Time Create discrete blocks of time each day when you will handle major Management Time activities. 1-3 email processing blocks per day. 1-3 call and meeting blocks per day. The goal here is to avoid a schedule where the red bleeds out everywhere across every single day. We are trying to keep the Management Time windows as discrete as possible to create space for the other types of time. 2. Increase Creation Time Creation is what propels us forward, with more interesting projects and opportunities. We all need more Creation Time in our days. As you batch Management Time, carve out distinct windows for Creation Time. Block them on your calendar. Don't check your email or messages during them. Focus on creation during your Creation Time. 3. Create Space for Consumption & Ideation Time Consumption and Ideation are the forgotten types of time because we rarely create space for them, but they are critical to long-term, compounding progress. History's most successful people have all made a practice out of creating space for reading, listening, learning, and thinking. We can draw a lesson from this. To start, schedule one short block per week for Consumption and one short block per week for Ideation. Stay true to the purpose of the block. Own that before increasing the presence of these types of time in your schedule. With these three tips in mind, you're well on your way to building a more optimal balance across the four types of professional time. *** You can join 650,000+ others who receive these actionable insights in my 2x weekly newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/esGsF85Q Enjoy this? Share the post with your network and follow me Sahil Bloom for more in future!

Most changes fail, especially if they are complex. But why? The Lippitt-Knoster model explains exactly why you don’t get what you want. Making changes is notoriously difficult, especially if they are substantial and complex. In response, there are many change management approaches and step-by-step instructions for managing change. But, to manage change, it is essential to first understand it. Once we know the key ingredients of a successful change, we know what it takes to make it. Even more importantly, once we know these ingredients, we also know WHY a change fails, so that we can do something about it. According to the Lippitt-Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change, a complete change effort requires the following six ingredients: 👉 Vision: sets the direction and explains why the change is needed 👉 Consensus: creates alignment and commitment for the change 👉 Skills: outlines the skills and expertise needed to realize the change 👉 Incentives: creates the motivation and drive to make the change 👉 Resources: enables the change with the needed time, money and tools 👉Action Plan: clarifies the roadmap and steps for realizing the change All six are needed. Consensus was added later by Knoster and it’s not so clear if both originators agree. Yet, I find it essential for any change to be successful, so you need all six. If you miss one you don’t get the change you want. ❌ Miss Vision and you get Confusion ❌ Miss Consensus and you get Sabotage ❌ Miss Skills and you get Anxiety ❌ Miss Incentives and you get Resistance ❌ Miss Resources and you get Frustration ❌ Miss Action Plan and you get False Starts So, here is what it takes to make a successful (complex) change: Step 1: Vision. Create and share a clear vision of the change and why it is needed. What will the new situation look like? Step 2: Consensus. Engage people across the organization to gather input and align their viewpoints in line with the vision. Step 3: Skills. Identify which skills are needed, provide the necessary training, upskill or attract people with the right skills. Step 4: Incentives. Understand what motivates people and create the right mechanisms for intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Step 5: Resources. Reserve enough time and money for making the change and obtain the necessary tools, technologies and other resources. Step 6: Action Plan. Develop a high-level roadmap and detailed action plan that outlines the priorities, order and steps for making the change. === Want to create true and lasting change? Then the Certified Strategy and Implementation Consultant (CSIC) program may be something for you. For more information and registration for the September 2024 cohort of this exciting program, and booking a call with our enrollment advisor, visit our website strategy.inc. 

It’s an oxymoron. But the AI bank debate ended before it even began. Banking is moving from customer- to agent-centric. And agentic banking is the real shift.   Three structural shifts are taking place:   • 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁-𝗲𝗻𝗱: Banks have always built tools to own the customer relationship - apps, portals, distribution channels. But agents will increasingly sit between customers and banks, making recommendations, negotiating, and even executing on their behalf. The entire customer journey is turned inside out, and banks need strategies to be discoverable, interoperable, and trusted by agents.   • 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸-𝗲𝗻𝗱: Core banking was once the heart of the bank - where accounts, ledgers, and transactions lived. Now agents are creating a new brain layer on top, orchestrating credit, risk, compliance, and operations in real time. Static legacy rules are replaced by adaptive reasoning powered by knowledge graphs, expertise, and reinforcement learning. The bank’s intelligence is migrating out of the core and into an agentic layer.   • 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Banks have long relied on hierarchies of people, processes, and departments. With agents acting as co-pilots and co-pilots evolving into autopilots, every role in the bank will be augmented or reshaped. This is an entirely different operating model where agents collaborate with humans, redefining how work is organized, supervised, and delivered.   These aren’t theoretical shifts - they’re already being put into practice. Huawei, a major provider of financial infrastructure, has released the 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿: a Financial Intelligent Agent Accelerator built to help banks move from pilots to full-scale commercialization.   FinAgent Booster is part of Huawei’s Digital Finance positioning – the application scenarios below are eye-opening:   • 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆𝘀: Accuracy, memory, and latency have long limited digital banking. Huawei employs a master-slave agent framework to interpret intent and coordinate tasks, a memory system that learns from context and past interactions, and full-chain optimization to ensure instant responses. The outcome is akin to a dedicated banker for every client.   • 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴: Agents are becoming the bank’s new decision layer. Thousands of reasoning chains and past insights are encoded into models that continuously learn and adapt.   • 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: Agents are being embedded to augment every role across the organization. Intelligent contact centres route customer needs to the right resources, insight hubs act as decision-making headquarters, and role-based agents support clients, loan officers, and back-office staff.   For banks, the agentic clock is already ticking.   Opinions: my own, Graphic source: Huawei, Panagiotis Kriaris   Subscribe to my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dkqhnxdg

Performance Management in the Age of AI: the new 3‑Dimensional Model For decades, the 9‑box grid shaped how organizations assessed talent—mapping individuals along two familiar axes: ✔ Business performance (“what”) ✔ Behaviors or potential (“how”) Over time, many companies moved away from this model, concluding it oversimplified the complexity of human performance and sometimes reinforced bias more than it reduced it. AI is fundamentally reshaping work, shortening the lifecycle of skills and creating new capability demands at a pace conventional frameworks were never designed to keep up with. As a result, a new paradigm for performance management is emerging. Organizations are starting to consider a three‑dimensional approach to performance—one that integrates not just what people deliver and how they behave, but also how they grow. The new 3D model consists of three axis: 1. Business Results: Measures impact, delivery, and contribution to outcomes. 2. Behaviors / Ways of Working: Captures collaboration, leadership etc. and.. 3. Skills Development: Assesses capability building, learning velocity, and readiness for future roles. The third axis reflects a simple reality: In an AI‑driven workforce, continuous skills development is no longer optional—it’s strategic. IBM has begun to formalize this multidimensional view in its talent and rewards model. Their approach includes: 1. Integrating skills into pay: Base pay and equity linked to skill progression. 2. Balancing objectives: Business and skills goals carry equal weight 3. Future skills visibility: Regular communication on evolving skill requirements see: https://lnkd.in/eTDE-XmE Not every organization can replicate this model at scale, but it illustrates where performance management is heading. The central questions are shifting. Not just: “Did someone deliver results?” But also: “Are they developing the skills the organization will need next?” and “Are they learning at the speed the environment requires?” The move from a 2D grid to a 3D, capability‑driven framework may become one of the most consequential shifts in performance management in the age of AI—signaling a future where growth, adaptability, and skill relevance stand on equal footing with results.