Interview questions John is ready to dig into. Copy them, tweak them, or bring your own.
1When an organization reaches a point where the old way of working no longer fits, what are the early signs leaders often miss?
2Why do companies often mistake a growth problem, acquisition problem, or culture problem for something much narrower than it really is?
3What changes when a company moves from informal ways of working into a more formal operating model?
4For middle-market companies, what tends to break first when growth starts outpacing infrastructure?
5How can leaders professionalize a business without stripping away the strengths that made it successful in the first place?
6When a PE-backed or newly acquired company is under pressure to scale, where do transformation efforts most often go wrong?
7What changes in the room when a leadership team stops defending its own function or region and starts thinking about the enterprise as a whole?
8Why do transformation efforts sometimes look well-managed on paper while still failing to change how the organization actually works?
9What role do leaders a couple of levels below the CEO play in whether a transformation scales or stalls?
10After an acquisition closes, what are some of the ways a buyer can unintentionally weaken the very business it wanted to buy?
11How should a new outside leader approach transformation when they have been brought in to fix or reset the business?
12For a CEO, board, or investor looking at disruption, stalled growth, or cultural friction, what is the first conversation that needs to happen before anyone launches a formal transformation program?