Irresistible Change: How to Spot Real Growth

Phil Gilbert, serial entrepreneur and former general manager at IBM, joins this episode of Motley Fool Money to talk about his new book, Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Mar 22, 2026.

Phil Gilbert: When you hear a lot of bluster from the CEO and there’s mandates involved, those are two leading indicators that the rank and file probably are not going to be given a chance to become bought in. They probably don’t have the agency that is required for them to truly adopt change and make it stick.

Mac Greer: That was IBM former general manager of design Phil Gilbert, author of the new book, Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-in and Breakout Success. I’m Motley Fool producer Mac Greer. Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau recently talked with Gilbert about change and about how investors can tell the difference between the real deal and CEO bluster.

Rich Lumelleau: Welcome to Motley Fool Conversations. I am Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau. Today, I’m joined by entrepreneur, executive, and author Phil Gilbert. His book, Irresistible Change explores what it takes to make change something organizations actually want to adopt. For investors, understanding which companies can truly reinvent themselves may be one of the most important edges in long term portfolio construction. Today, we’ll explore how to identify real transformation, how to separate change from theater, and how culture, customer experience, and incentives ultimately drive shareholder value. Phil, welcome to the Motley Fool. te

Phil Gilbert: Great. Thank you, Rich.

Rich Lumelleau: I’m glad we have a chance sit down and talk. I guess it’s always helpful just to get a little bit of background. Got a unique experience, an entrepreneurial, but then big business background. Now you’re an author. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Phil Gilbert: Sure. I was really a serial entrepreneur and pictured myself as a startup guy. My third company was a company called Lombardi Software. We were in this pretty mundane middleware space called Business Process Management. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, and in 2010, IBM bought us to be honest, it was a great exit. Shareholders were happy. Customers were happy with a company like that to support them. I figured I would work with the team for a year or so to get them through the integration, but always figured startup number four was out there. A speed bump got put in that path, and that’s what turned into probably the most fascinating 10 or 12 years of my entire career, and that’s what the book is about. The change that I led at IBM of how about 400,000 people across 180 countries did their work every day.

Rich Lumelleau: Absolutely fascinating. I guess we can jump right in, taking a look at the book itself, you argue that most change initiatives struggle or fail. As investors, how can we spot ones that are likely to fail early, if that makes sense?

Phil Gilbert: Probably going to fail early?

Rich Lumelleau: From your experience, taking a look at something where it’s like, this doesn’t have legs.

Phil Gilbert: Typically, what I look for is when you hear a lot of bluster from the CEO and there’s mandates involved, those are two leading indicators that the rank and file probably are not going to be given a chance to become bought in. They probably don’t have the agency that is required for them to truly adopt change and make it stick. I tend to look for organizations that are quietly changing and where the CEO is not out over his or her skis in building it up and certainly not building it up on earnings calls before there’s real evidence of it succeeding.

Rich Lumelleau: Actually, it’s funny, literally, as I was kind of asking that question, my follow up was going to be, is there specific language in earnings calls that signal more of a compliance mindset versus the opposite, wanting to do this.

Phil Gilbert: Though shot. We saw a lot of it, and I think a lot of it was corrected. I think several of the best CEOs course corrected, but the return-to-office mandates immediately following the pandemic were a pretty classic transformation play. It’s where your culture had adopted a new set of behaviors that didn’t feel was the long term behavior that your company needed to compete. You had all these return-to-office mandates and these things were talked about quite a bit. You just saw and you felt all of the resistance from the employees against the way it was being done. For my clients, I always said, If you’ve got to mandate somebody to be back in your office, you’re probably doing something wrong. Why don’t you start with developing the environmental culture that you want and then introduce your employees to it. If it’s truly better, they will come. Now, that’s, by and large what’s happened. But in those early days of return-to-office, what you saw on story of compliance theater where people would give friends their badges to swipe or they would swipe in and immediately swipe out, whatever it might be. That was just a real case study, a very short term case study that’s very visceral that everybody can, I think, relate to.

Rich Lumelleau: One of the things that you touch on or emphasize is emotional engagement. From your perspective, how does that show up in measurable metrics? Are there key performance indicators that suggest that it’s working?

Phil Gilbert: Well, there certainly are. I mean, we had many. A lot of times for investors, they are not necessarily the kinds of metrics that are necessarily publicized, not necessarily because the entity doesn’t want to or is hiding them. But they’re just typically not the kinds of things that investors or that Wall Street is asking about. But certainly, most organizations, most large organizations these days have employee engagement scores. Most of them are keeping track of how their customers and stakeholders are evaluating them through even rudimentary things like net promoter score. These are the kinds of metrics that are leading indicators to where the culture truly is. Those are the things that I would try to dig into and try to uncover as much as possible.

Rich Lumelleau: Based on your experience, what does a healthy adoption curve look like inside of a company where you know this is working?

Phil Gilbert: I had something I relate the story in the book to the first time that I had just been asked to lead this transformation, and I was making a world tour of visiting companies that had great human centered cultures and companies that weren’t known for that, and also some of the schools that I knew we would be recruiting from to get some of these new skills. I was out at Stanford and I was meeting with David Kelly, who is the founder of the D. School at Stanford and talking him through the fact that we’re going to turn IBM into a human centered organization. Design thinking is going to be at the heart of what we do, and this is how we understand problems, and he was checked out, and I don’t think necessarily believed it. But at the time, this was an audacious claim. He said at one point, he said, “Phil, the good news is, in order for any culture to adopt something, you only need to get 25% of the people. That’s the tipping point,” and then he stopped, and he goes, “that’s 100,000 people.” Then he engaged in the conversation much differently.

But the funny thing is, is we found that to be true. We actually adopted a tactic where you can obviously, now you can chunk down, in our case, 400,000 people to 100,000. Well, that’s helpful. 100,000 easier than 400,000. But we actually found that it worked even further chunk down by essentially, you can think of it as almost division. What we found is that in the product group at the time, we had about 20 or 25,000 people actively working on products, coding, designing, product managers. Once we hit about 5,000 or 6,000, everything changed. That happens for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you’ve read anything about how tribes work, it just takes one trusted member of another tribe in order for you to trust that tribe. Once you get 25 or 30% of the people, you probably know firsthand at least one, but probably multiple people who are being positively impacted by the change. Then the other thing is, in order to get to 5,000 or 6,000 people, it took us a year and a half or 18, 20 months, something like that. Well, by that time, people are also shifting jobs. Now they’re dragging these new skills and these new ideas with them to their new teams. Even if that new team hadn’t been formally brought into the program, the new ideas were starting to percolate. We actually started using that as a metric pretty actively as we would move from unit to unit or capability to capability. We then sized that whole thing, and then we intentionally targeted, in a sense, the easiest 25% to get. That became a very useful tactic for us to help us scale out the change. Once you hit that 25% tipping point, the rest go very fast.

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Rich: Look for the Civil War and reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. You’ve worn many hats. What can public company CEOs learn from entrepreneurs?

Phil Gilbert: I think the main thing is this notion of never being settled with the status quo. The possibilities of value creation are so much more interesting than the possibilities of cost reduction. To me, that’s the single biggest difference between, I’ll see the stereotypical big-company C-suite mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset. The entrepreneurial mindset is like, “Forget cost, I can create value.” The stereotypical big company mindset is, here’s a new way to save money. If you think about what’s happening with some of the and I don’t think many of these recent layoffs have actually been because of AI. I think it’s primarily pandemic over hiring and the productivity that we got from pandemic era tooling. But if you just explore the logic of laying people off because of AI, what you’re essentially saying is, I’m perfectly happy with today’s outcomes. I can now get them cheaper. That is not an entrepreneurial mindset. The entrepreneurial mindset would be, I’ve got this human capital, and it may need to be shifted some. I may need different some more of this and some less of that. But I have this human investment. Now I have this superpower technology. What value can I now create? What market share can I go grab with that combination? There are a few companies that have that mindset at the top today, but only a few, and they’ll be the winners.

Rich Lumelleau: Are there examples where transformation actually destroys value or harms value?

Phil Gilbert: I hope not.

Rich Lumelleau: I mean, I can’t think of any off top of my head, but I’m just curious if in your studies, or maybe, overreaching change, goes too far?

Phil Gilbert: Not if it’s done right. Never. Again, you would only get in that situation if some idiot thing was mandated and not learned from. Now, is there a creative destruction that happens? Absolutely. I mean, you can intentionally blow things up in order to come out with something better at the end. But if you don’t come out with something demonstrably better at the end. Demonstrably better, to me it’s quite simple. It’s better outcomes in the marketplace. It is more differentiation for your product, higher margins for your product, greater customer share. Those are the outcomes that transformation should be driving toward. Outcomes that are purely cost based, to me are not transformation. That’s not transformational. That’s just business as usual.

Rich Lumelleau: This is such an interesting perspective to have. This book is something that especially in this era of change with AI where it is right now. I think that for our investors, if you’re building a portfolio today, are there certain transformation signals that they should be prioritizing as they try to look through this lens that you’re presenting us with?

Phil Gilbert: I think, again, going back to one of our first things, digging deep on how these companies are starting to embed AI and how they’re thinking about embedding AI into their organizations. If they’re talking about individual productivity metrics, they’re probably not measuring the right thing. Even really forward thinking CEOs are saying things like, well, 30% of our code is being generated by AI today. Well, who cares? What does that even mean? Why isn’t it a million percent of your code? I mean, AI can generate whatever you want it to generate. The question is, what are your products any better? Finding companies who are talking about how AI is differentiating their customer experience. In tangible ways with real quantitative feedback against it, again, like NPS or some other metrics, those are the companies that are really thinking about this the right way. Anyway, to put a cap on that, if people are still touting vanity metrics, percentage of code complete or how many memos were generated or how many marketing emails went out or blah, I can guarantee you those are not companies that get it.

They’re quite happy with their vanity metrics. The companies that are really seriously thinking about how they’re evaluating the value of AI in the context of their business outcomes are the companies who are at least trying to really get it right. One of the things that I’ve been working on lately, and I haven’t seen anybody do it, but I’ve been doing a lot of work, and I’m about to write a thing on it is there’s a lot of talk about we’re now managing tokens. We’re managing AI like headcount. We’re managing tokens like headcount. Seems to me that if that’s the case, then we ought to be looking at revenue per token numbers in the same way that we look at revenue per headcount. Then you need to think about, well, how do you normalize the cost of a headcount versus the cost of a token? Tokens today’s cost. I think anthropic tokens on a blended basis between the input and output tokens are about $30 a piece. What’s your revenue per million tokens?

Do you normalize that against headcount? Now you monetize headcount and you monetize tokens, and what’s your revenue per that target? These are the kinds of business metrics that I think when companies start doing this, those are the companies that are really going to be figuring out how to make the most use of AI and the most balanced use of AI on their teams. I was with a client last week and they were talking about the cost of tokens and how their teams at enterprise scale are now allocated tokens, and the teams are now running out of tokens because of these individual usage mandates. They’re using tokens way too early in the development process for it to be useful, and they’re running out of their allocation of tokens, and so they’re having to use the human expertise for the harder problems that crop up downstream in the production of a product. Now they’re starting to try to get their heads around how do we limit usage upfront so that we have tokens available for some of the harder problems at the end. I don’t know that anybody has it figured out yet. But these are the kinds of questions, and as you can identify companies that are talking about it in this depth of terms, I think these are companies to be watched. Because they’re the ones that are going to figure out how to create a differentiating and sustainable business model on the back of the real costs of these things and the real power of these things.

Rich Lumelleau: I guess I’ll wrap up by asking, what does irresistible change ultimately teach investors, again, thinking of our audience about long-term value creation?

Phil Gilbert: I think to determine organizations where change will actually have a meaningful shift in their fortunes, finding companies that are approaching transformation in a way that is real, and not just theater is key. Somebody who had identified, and there were people that did, who identified IBM in 2017, they’re quite happy today. It takes more work. It takes rigor. It absolutely takes reading the tea leaves and reading between the lines. But if you really find out the companies where CEOs are making long-term commitments, and not just mandating theater, but long term commitments to change, and where employee engagement is rising, where people are excited to go to work and stay at work, I think personnel retention rates are probably a pretty interesting indicator of companies who are going through transformation and where people are staying, that’s a pretty good indicator. You have time. This is one area where you have a few quarters, if not a few years to take a look and see how it’s taking hold because so much of the investment market is still so reactive. That if you find a company that is truly undergoing a transformation, then you believe in it, and the CEO and the board have the fortitude to see it through, you will see a benefit.

Rich Lumelleau: Well, Phil, thank you so much for coming on to Motley Fool Conversations. For the listeners, it’s Irresistible Change is the book. Phil Gilbert is the author, especially in this day and age with AI and everything else going on. It’s a really interesting read for investors out there. Thank you again for your time.

Phil Gilbert: Thank you, Rich.

Mac Greer: As always, people on the program may have an interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don’t buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley full editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley Full Money Team, I’m Mac Greer. Thanks for listening, and we will see you tomorrow.