After IBM bought his startup in 2010, the Coins2Day 500 computer company asked Phil Gilbert to reinvigorate how its teams developed products. Gilbert became IBM’s general manager of design, and over the following decade, he brought design thinking—a philosophy that focuses on the experience of the end user—to the company’s 400,000 employees.
TL;DR
- Treat change as a valuable product with ownership and financial responsibility.
- Design change with a focus on the employee user experience, addressing their concerns.
- Understand and cater to the unique needs of leadership, middle managers, and individual contributors.
- Make change appealing and desirable, like a luxury good, to ensure lasting adoption.
Gilbert's latest book Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success details his success in motivating countless employees to accept change, offering insights for other organizations navigating their own transformations, whether driven by AI, design, or evolving work environments.
From Wall Street banks doubling down on return-to-office to tech giants restructuring teams around AI, leaders are once again asking employees to change how they work.
We often underestimate how delicate the present truly is. Technology constantly disrupts, tending to turn once-special things into commodities and pushing a rapid, Moore's Law-like pace into all aspects of our daily work. Acknowledging this fact reveals a significant insight: future market dominance will hinge on your capacity to welcome and guide transformation now.
My tenure leading IBM’s worldwide transformation involved guiding numerous interdisciplinary teams to embrace entrepreneurship, agility, and a customer-centric approach, starting in 2012.
Thousands of teams joined us without any mandate or persuasion. They even paid for the opportunity. These teams progressively revolutionized their operational methods, as the program's entire framework and implementation focused on their satisfaction and delivering value at every interaction.
Those changes have stuck; they’ve become the cultural core for how IBM does business today.
Change is unavoidable; that's evident. However, what distinguishes exceptional organizations is the deliberate and rapid manner in which they manage transitions. Being satisfied with current operational methods invites future catastrophe. A more beneficial perspective was once shared with me thus: “We must always look at the status quo with disdain.”
In the years ahead, organizations that embrace this perspective broadly will emerge as the ultimate victors across markets, their communities, and even in conflict. Across all sectors, businesses need to leverage this rejection of the current state to foster environments of inquiry, creativity, and flexibility. Eventually, these entities will build something profoundly more significant and potent: an ingrained tendency—akin to an instinct—to drive ongoing, impactful transformation.
Our transformation initiative unearthed and revitalized an entrepreneurial drive that had been dormant at IBM for years. All our past accomplishments at IBM served merely as preliminary models, initial demonstrations for future endeavors. What commenced over ten years ago has now evolved into a robust framework that I trust others will adopt and adapt for their own use within any company, regardless of its scale.
Change as a product
What can other leaders do to establish their own dependable, successful method for change? They can do what we did: conceptualize change as a product.
Change should be viewed as a highly valuable product, warranting similar resource allocation and operational diligence as your most successful offerings. This necessitates distinct ownership, strategic direction, and, crucially, financial responsibility. Implementing change with this structured and disciplined approach is the key to ensuring its success.
Within this framework, transformation is what you offer, your company serves as the venue, and its various groups are the recipients of your services.
Consider the last product you truly embraced. You found it, understood it, tested it, purchased it, utilized it, and ideally, if the company succeeded, you returned for additional purchases. Change operates on a similar trajectory. If your workforce can't find it, can't experiment with it securely, or can't receive assistance when issues arise, they'll revert to their previous methods.
Change as a user experience
Designing change solely as a product isn't sufficient; it must also be delivered as one. This necessitates a focus on the customer experience, specifically how your employees encounter and integrate change into their daily tasks.
Your change program's participants are your customers, and they should always be treated as such. This is particularly crucial with your initial adopters. If they abandon your program, you must accept responsibility and identify solutions to address any shortcomings. Even those who actively oppose change are, in a sense, a reflection of your customer service. This is because nobody dislikes improvement. Resistance to change stems from a perception of threat—to one's career, standing, or power. The source of this perceived threat might not be immediately apparent to you.
IBM's change initiative required attention to the requirements of three key stakeholder groups: top leadership, mid-level supervisors, and individual contributors. The way each of these three sets of people perceives and reacts to change varies significantly, necessitating that all aspects of any offered experience be customized to suit their unique worries.
Top leaders recognize the necessity for transformation. Their primary worry is that any alterations will either be excessively protracted or prove unscalable. Consequently, you'll need to devise not just a strategic communication strategy for them, but also establish significant “in process” performance indicators that demonstrate progress. For IBM, this involved holding quarterly individual meetings between each senior leader and myself. These discussions were organized around how we were influencing the three core elements that shape culture and results: modifications to our personnel, our methodologies, and our environments.
Middle managers often face unique challenges that are neglected in change initiatives. Throughout a change program, these individuals are tasked with maintaining their upper-level operations according to the established culture while simultaneously overseeing diverse teams adopting novel and significantly altered methods. Occasionally, they may not perceive the necessity for their departments to be disrupted by these changes. It's crucial to explain the reasoning behind the change and its potential impact on them to gain their backing.
The individuals on your team bear the brunt of outdated work methods and unproductive processes, which are the primary drivers for most change initiatives. While they recognize the necessity for change, they're concerned that the adjustments might not be substantial enough to make a difference or that the company might lack the resolve to complete them. Furthermore, a failed change initiative could negatively impact their professional reputations. Your change strategy must consistently demonstrate to team members that the implemented changes are effective and expanding. These are the individuals you'll build the strongest relationships with and dedicate the most time to, and their results will directly mirror the initial achievements of your program.
A disciplined customer service approach is essential for identifying and resolving these customer interaction points. It's crucial to understand your customers deeply to effectively assist them with their issues. While some problems might appear minor to you, they hold significant importance for your customers. By treating customers with respect and giving serious consideration to even their seemingly minor concerns, you'll discover a wealth of innovative solutions. This has been our consistent experience. Challenges and hindrances spurred continuous breakthroughs, as we never accepted the notion that “they just don’t get it.”
Change as a luxury good
By understanding and designing for these concerns, you can move past simply making change acceptable. You can transform it into something appealing, which individuals will actively pursue.
Begin with understanding that you are selling the ultimate luxury good. No one values economy-class change. Only a platinum-tier solution will spark the excitement and customer demand required to drive widespread adoption of change, and have it stick. Sustainable cultural change, like any other product in the luxury category, is rare, highly desirable, and above all, it deeply engages the emotions. Change is both difficult and powerful because it challenges people’s prior beliefs and assumptions about what is possible in their careers and their lives.The change product you offer will transform people’s lives for the better in ways that can’t be counted.
And start small, but make it whole. That’s one thing I knew from decades as a product guy. Do not raise expectations beyond what your offering is ready to provide now. A perfectly prepared cupcake is more satisfying than a half-baked wedding cake. Starting small, with just a few teams delivering exceptionally differentiated outcomes will ultimately scale more quickly than starting big with training and “enablement” that rarely leads to adoption.
Change is inevitable, so make it irresistible
Designing change this way—small but whole, premium in feel, and responsive to real needs—creates momentum that lasts. And momentum is critical, because the future isn’t slowing down.
The future will always surprise us, but one thing is certain: it will demand change. With AI reshaping industries and economic uncertainty rattling markets, change seems to be our only constant. Leaders who treat change not as a one-off initiative but as their most valuable product won’t just endure disruption—they’ll capitalize on it.
Adapted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success by Phil Gilbert. Copyright © 2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold.
Coins2Day’s Brainstorm Design conference returns on Dec. 2 at the MGM Macau! Join speakers like Gilbert Workshop managing partner Phil Gilbert, IDEO CEO Mike Peng, and Samsung chief design officer Mauro Porcini for a day of deep discussions on this year’s theme: “Future Tense: Prototyping Tomorrow.” Register here!