"What was the biggest corporate folly you 'bought into'—agreeing to move forward with a project on a consultant's advice?" This seemingly provocative question opens a necessary reflection on management fads that consume resources without generating real value.
The list of fads is extensive and well-known: process reengineering, process mapping, continuous process improvement, Six Sigma, Kaizen, technologies for process documentation, competency assessment, potential assessment, and organizational design. But perhaps the most costly purchase for many organizations came with Y2K: before the new millennium, it was believed the change from 1999 to 2000 could produce a massive failure in computer systems that used two digits to represent the year.
Multinational corporations invested millions to update systems and prevent disasters that, ultimately, never occurred. This pattern constantly repeats with other passing fads, whose implementations show that the results often differ greatly from the numbers seen in Excel.
What is the skill a leader in the 21st century must have to distinguish the false prophets from the real trends? The answer lies in asking the right question before evaluating any initiative. But the key question is twofold: What real need do I have to meet? And How will this improve the consumer’s life?
If the customer is indifferent to the automation of a process or the implementation of a new methodology, that’s a red flag. In that case, only two justifications are truly valid: that the initiative generates significant savings for the company or that it adds so much value it allows you to clearly surpass the competition.
This two-part question acts as a powerful filter to distinguish between real value and meaningless organizational activism.
The salespeople of corporate fads have an arsenal of seemingly irrefutable arguments. Recognizing them is the first step to avoiding their traps:
The Pressure of Competition: “If every other company in our industry has done it, how can we not?” This is perhaps the most common, but also the weakest, excuse. If everyone does it, you end up looking like everyone else. Differentiation doesn't come from following the herd, but from understanding what the organization truly needs.
The Perfect Business Case: Excels can be deceptive when presenting the business cases for these initiatives. It's advisable to distrust numbers that look too perfect. Stratospheric ROIs in PowerPoint presentations rarely materialize in reality.
The Artificial Urgency: "If we don't do it now, we'll miss the boat." This time pressure prevents necessary reflection and pushes leaders toward hasty decisions that prove costly later on.
The interesting thing is that the same tools that fail in one organization can be successful in another. It’s not so much about the project itself, but the context where the change occurs. "It's the people," as the phrase goes. Success depends on the company's social ecosystem and whether the team has the relational conditions, sufficient attention, and the necessary sense of urgency.
Instead of chasing fads, intelligent organizations focus on three things that are genuinely important and make them different or unique: the client, product quality, and the power of innovation.
These criteria should be "timeless": if the company is 100 years old, one might ask what was important a century ago and remains important now. This long-term perspective helps leaders forget short-term uncertainty and think in terms of decades.
Take the example of Black Sabbath's farewell: 5.8 million people streaming, 40,000 at Villa Park in Birmingham, playing songs more than 50 years old that are still relevant. Why did it work? Because there was a before and after. They invented the concept of heavy metal, they constantly evolved, but they returned to their essence. People seek that essence. The band used a new vehicle (streaming), but the essence remained the same.
Genuine transformations combine two elements: the essence (what truly matters to the organization) and the opportune context for that change to happen. That is where we can speak of a truly transformational change.
True value is seen when there is a before-and-after, not just in processes, but in the organization's ability to find deep meaning in what it does.
The 21st-century skill is distinguishing the false prophets from the real and profound trends. This requires:
Starting from the real need: What is the need I have to address?
Evaluating the customer impact: If it doesn't improve their experience, what's the point?
Considering the organizational context: Do we have the conditions for this to work?
Maintaining timeless criteria: Does this contribute to what has made us unique for decades?
The next time someone appears selling the latest organizational "revolution," remember to ask yourself these questions. In a world full of false prophets, the organizations that thrive are those that manage to distinguish between the passing fad and the genuinely transformative change.