Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success
Phil Gilbert
Wiley (November 2025)

Soon, change will be your product, your organization will be the marketplace, and its teams will be your customers.

I agree with Phil Gilbert that the challenges C-level executives face today are occurring faster and in greater number than ever before.

In The Innovation Ultimatum (Wiley (2020), Steve Brown observes, “There is a massive and rapidly widening gulf between the capabilities of companies that invest in technology and those that don’t. It is a time of reckoning. Emerging technologies will empower brave innovators to make giant steps forward, while those without vision, courage, and agility will wither and perish. Winners will change the world.” Quite literally, here’s the imperative: “Innovate or die. These technologies can be your best friends or worst enemies. That’s up to you.”

All this serves as an introduction to Phil Gilbert’s recently published analysis of how and why the business world today is even more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than it was only fivc years ago.

Change initiatives, therefore, will probably be less likely to succeed…more likely to fail. In fact, John Kotter asserts that about 70% of them thus far have failed. During my interview with him a few years ago, he suggested that the most difficult change for agents to complete is changing how they think about change.

Soon, Gilbert predicts, “change will be your product to sell, your organization will be the marketplace, and its teams will be your customers.”

In 2012, he agreed to lead a global transformation of IBM, a company with 400,000 employees across 170 countries. Another 400,000 people outside IBM received learning tools and certification. Over time, 1,200 interdisciplinary teams at IBM were involved. Their objective as individuals and as a group was to become more entrepreneurial, more agile, and more customer-focused.

Results? Gilbert says they were “astonishing.”   He then adds, “Although it took us years to achieve these changes among hundreds of thousands of IBM employees around the world  — [e.g reduction of overall product time-to-market by 50 percent, reduction of average time product teams need to align on initial requirements by 75 percent, cut thev time required for product development and testing by one-third], — what made the crucial difference was the groundwork laid in year one. During our third quarter, when we were still working with our first seven ‘customers,’ we could already see how our program was poised for self-sustaining long-term success.”

I commend Phil Guilbert on a brilliant, uniquely substantial contribution to thought leadership.

Be sure to read and then (yes) re-read the Appendix: “The Irresistible Experiences Playbook.”

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Here are two other suggestions while you are reading Irresistible Change: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to end-of-chapter “Takeways.”

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.