Charlene Li has advised 14 of the Dow Jones 30. Written seven books on transformation. When I asked her what kills companies, she didn't say competition. She didn't say bad strategy.
She said growth.
Hold on. Growth is the goal. How can it be the problem?
Her answer: because nobody prepares for what growth does to the people inside the company. CEOs chase disruption to drive growth. Charlene says it's backwards. Growth itself is the disruption. And it hits from the inside.
I watched this happen last year.
A CEO I coach launched a new go-to-market strategy. Bold move. Board loved it. First two quarters, the numbers came in strong. Growth was real.
And then things started breaking. His head of sales, who'd been a star for four years, started resisting the new model. Not openly. Quietly. Slow-walking decisions. Protecting her team from changes that threatened how they'd always worked. Two of his best product people left within a month of each other. Not because they disagreed with the strategy. Because the speed of change made them feel irrelevant before anyone noticed.
He called me on a Friday evening and said: "The strategy is working. The company is falling apart. How is that possible?"
That's the moment Charlene is describing. Growth didn't fail. Growth succeeded. And the success broke the old shape of the organisation faster than anyone was ready for.
Adobe lived this at scale.
When they moved from selling software on CDs to cloud subscriptions, people inside the company were calling analysts saying "you won't believe what's happening here." The CEO went to shareholders and said: for the next eight quarters, we will lose money. Ignore the bottom line. Watch these numbers instead.
Profits went down. Stock went up. Because he held the vision while everyone else absorbed the shock. He didn't get pulled into the firefighting. That's a job only the CEO can do. The moment you get dragged into the weeds, nobody is holding the future.
The part nobody talks about
Charlene calls it the fallacy of innovation. We obsess over the launch. We assume the hard part is getting the strategy right. The hard part is what happens after. When growth starts threatening how people see their own role. Their relevance. Their identity inside the company.
I see it in every transformation I coach through. The CEO is confused because the strategy is working but the culture is fracturing. Resistance appearing in places they didn't expect. Their best people going quiet or going sideways.
It's because growth demands that people change. And people don't resist change because they're weak. They resist because nobody helped them understand what they're changing into.
Charlene made one distinction I keep coming back to.
The CEO is the only person who carries the vision all the time. Others build plans. Others solve problems. But if the CEO gets pulled into the chaos that growth creates, the future goes unattended. And an unattended future is how companies that are winning start losing.
If your company is growing right now, the question isn't whether disruption is coming. It's already here. Inside.
The question is whether you've prepared your people for what that growth is about to break.
🎧 Full conversation with Charlene Li on The World Class Leaders Show: link below.
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.