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Same furniture, same house, different angle on the telly.
Mckinsey's 2025 refresh on operating-model redesign, based on 2,000 executives across 16 sectors was prompted by a decade of frustration that repeated redesigns were "wasting time and resources, sapping morale, and yielding disappointing results."
This seems to be McKinsey saying McKinsey-style re-orgs don't work.
The consulting equivalent of a wine merchant clearing his throat and gently suggesting water.
McKinsey research by Scott Keller and Mary Meaney found that 82% of us have lived through a corporate redesign at their current employer, 70% within the last two years, and a majority are bracing for another.
Companies, it turns out, reorganise themselves more often than they redesign their websites.
The website, at least, has the decency to load.
The cycle is well documented. A new executive arrives. They take one look at the org chart and conclude, with the certainty of someone who has read exactly one consulting deck on the plane over, that the issue is structural. Boxes are redrawn. Reporting lines migrate. Job titles acquire the word "Transformation," sometimes twice.
A typical re-org takes ten months.
Productivity falls during this period. Two-thirds eventually deliver "some" improvement, which is a polite way of saying a third deliver none, and one in ten actively makes things worse. The post-implementation review rarely captures this, because it is written by the team that ran the re-org.
Six months in, the same problems are present, with new email signatures.
This is because the problems were not structural. They were behavioural.
The person who refused to share data with marketing now refuses to share data with marketing while reporting to a different vice-president.
Behaviour, regrettably, does not change when you change a Visio shape.
There is an entire career path built around this.
It is called the Chief Transformation Officer. Sometimes it works well.. but their LinkedIn profiles read like the highlights of a particularly grim Russian novel: same protagonist, different city, identical ending.
A re-org is not a strategy.
It is what usually happens when the strategy is lacking. and need to look busy until you do.
If the answer to a strategic question is a new reporting line, you have not answered the question. You have, however, generated 90 days of plausible activity, six months of moderate disruption, and a steady stream of internal comms about "embracing change."
Which, in some quarters, is the same thing.
