My Quinquennium: Lessons learnt on driving change in Corporate life
Originally published on Substack on October 21, 2025.
A Quinquennium is the latin word for a 5 year period, a block of time in ones life that is neither too short nor too long to reflectively consider in retrospect ( Thank you Cicero ).
My last 5 years have been of both constant change and calming moderation. Of moving to another country, getting married and having our first child, to steady progress of a career path I admit I more or less fell into. Forgive me for navel gazing but retrospectively admitting that is rather cathartic.
I've always believed that life is made up of chapters or perhaps volumes, with each having its own beginning, middle and end. To recognise which chapter you're in and act accordingly is a remarkably advantageous skill, to cling white knuckled to the action scene in the last chapter gives little benefit to your broader narrative and actually can be pretty harmful.
My Quinquennium
Reflecting on my last Quinquennium (2020-24, given I've been largely on Parental leave through 2025) the key themes are:
A. From Agility to Bureaucracy: From building products in small agile teams to finding my place in a sprawling corporate Bureaucracy.
B. From building Product to working on the company as a product
C. From Technology to People & Politics
Effectively I've been learning how to be a leader within a traditional corporate environment, understanding the shifting poles of people, process and information that make-up a 30,000+ person corporate, connected to each other in endless combinations. To making recommendations and the odd decision (if I'm to be gracious to myself) on what needs tweaking, what needs pruning and what needs creating to the benefit of a evolving complex system that is surprising resilient to top down reform.
Reading Elephants can't dance in 2020 when I'd just entered this new world, I naively thought that being a leader in a big organisation was akin to playing SimCity, that sitting in the centre you could lay down new roads, zone new office blocks and shift taxes in your area of responsibility relatively at will. That day to day problem solving was akin to Lou Gerstner (obviously at a much lower level).
“Today (circa 2001) IBM has one Chief Information Officer. Back then we had, by actual count, 128 people with CIO in their titles — all of them managing their own local systems architectures and ttr ledger systems. At one time our HR systems were so rigid that you actually had to be fired by one division to be Hired by another”
Lou Gerstner, IBM
The reality of a complex system is much more complex; real power in large corporates is diffuse, fancy job titles often mean little in terms of what actual power & influence an individual has, the tail can often wag the dog. I needed to build a new mental model for the organisation, mapping the processes; the plumbing of the firm with the loci of power; who had the real ability to support or block change.
Lessons Learnt
Politics & Power
Politics is a word with such a dirty reputation, but spend time within a large organisation, especially a bureaucracy and you realise how internal politics drives at least 50% of decision making. Can such be a surprise when you throw Type A personalities together? That gamification quickly takes hold when those who want to make their mark on the world run-up on the limitations of a corporate entity.
A learning that took longer to sink in that I'd like to admit was…
Job Title ≠ Power
Whilst 'Directors’ and 'VPs’ were dime a dozen, those with real power and influence outside their silos were a much smaller group. Yet nowhere will this be written, nor a consensus exist on who makes up this group; you have learn for yourself by talking across the org chart on who has real influence at which level and some of the answers will surprise you.
Mapping these out is fundamental for getting anything of substance done; whether at a local, regional or global level.
William Pitt the younger refused the first offer of UK Prime Ministership from King George III in 1783 because he didn't think he had the support of a sufficient number of MPs to wield actual power. That the title without the means to deliver was a poisoned chalice, this is as true in a 20th Century corporate as in 18th Century Britain.
Consensus Building
Once you understand who has real power or influence on what, the real work begins to build consensus. A VP mentor (with 'Real’ power… I think…) described his job as a Diplomat; living a day-to-day that a UN General Assembly member would largely recognise to bring the right people together at the right time with the right messages.
If this sounds slow and frustrating…. well yes….. there is a reason why ‘Startups’ have a reputation of running rings around Corporates when it comes to decision making; this is the fundamental reason why. (Almost) No individual has the ability to definitively make a substantial decision in a corporate, consensus rules supreme.
There are innumerable books on diplomacy so I won't rehash a subject I'm only an apprentice of, but a few lessons learnt are:
A. Charisma matters ; whilst there is a time and place for having the courage to be disliked . In consensus building, this is not it. Spending time building relationships with those who matter… matters…. and charisma makes this a hell of a lot easier.
B. Walk a mile in their shoes; understand what the decision/change means for each individuals realm of power/influence and adjust the messaging accordingly. Know when the decision/change may be seen as a threat in one of the endless games/quarrels going on at local, regional and global levels.
C. Use process and governance as an enabler ; Just because something is written down in a process or governance doc does not make it consensus. Yet, using these structures as a mechanism for gaining consensus either proactively (to frame the issue/decision) or retrospectively (to instigate the consensus building or raise its priority) is really helpful.
Incentives
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”
Charlie Munger
So commonly quoted it’s probably a fallacy now but I still like it.
To get any change to stick in a complex system you have to understand the incentives wherever the change will touch. To understand why things are as they are today whether formally or informally, and design your change to either fit in with existing incentive structures or have a real chance of changing the existing incentives. Organisations always have core concepts; processes or culture that is fundamental to the operating model. Know what these are and know that however cleverly you try to re-design incentives it is highly unlikely anything will change. I used to say that moaning about the ‘billable hours’ metric as a blocker was as to wishing gravity was a little bit less on earth; its fundamental to a Consulting business model whether you like it or not.
Even if you have done the hard work to understand the power & politics around a change and built consensus with the right players, all will be for null if you get the incentives wrong in delivery. For small/simple changes, tweaks to processes will usually work, for anything substantial however where you need a large number of people to actually do something or change how they work top-down dictat will rarely work unless reinforced by the right incentives.
Change Management
If a lot of this sounds like fundamentals of Change Management , well…. yes…. it probably is!
Coming from the product world, Change Management wasn't something I'd ever really dealt with outside the quite different scenarios of growing user adoption and retaining users of whichever product(s) I was working on at the time.
Maybe in retrospect I should have signed up to a certification on Change Management in 2020… oh well!