ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, one of the biggest goals for organizations today is to become more nimble so you can quickly respond to change, constantly capitalize on new opportunities, and continuously transform your business as the market demands.
ADI IGNATIUS: So we talk about that a lot, we need to be more nimble, but how do you actually do that?
ALISON BEARD: Well, our guest today argues that the best way is by moving to a more project-driven model of work, up and down the organization from the corporate level to individual teams. He wants us to both ruthlessly prioritize as well as stay fluid so that we’re identifying strategic goals, assembling teams to go after them, evaluating as we go, and then either continuing, shifting, or disbanding based on our outcomes.
ADI IGNATIUS: So that sounds really positive and sounds different from the traditional model of maintaining and growing operations, managing talent. It also sounds really hard.
ALISON BEARD: Yes. And I think we know that from experience having worked on projects ourselves. But our guest today, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, has studied a bunch of companies around the world who have adopted this model organization-wide, and he’s here to give us a play-by-play on how leadership, org design, and ideas about value creation need to change in order to make that happen and to reap the benefits, which he says are both financial in terms of new revenue streams, but also psychological in terms of more energized and engaged employees.
So here’s my conversation with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, CEO of Projects & Company and author of the HBR article, The Project-Driven Organization, as well as the book, Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age.
Antonio, thanks so much for being on the show.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:
Thank you for inviting me.
ALISON BEARD: So project management has been your life’s work for decades. What is different now in early 2026 than even a few years ago in terms of how companies need to think about projects?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Alison, I’m sure you’ve experienced this too – I think you see more projects and you see longer projects, projects that never end. So I think what we’ve seen over the last five years, is that it’s just more difficult to manage. And people are getting a bit saturated, overload. And I think there’s a need for doing projects, for sure. This is critical. Projects are your future, but in different ways.
My first book, which was called The Project Handbook, was for practitioners, for people who are leading, managing projects. Many of them are part-time project managers because they have a daily job. With this one, I’m talking to the senior leaders, to the CEO, to the executives, and I’m telling them the world has changed, so they also need to change and spend more time doing transformation work, projects. They need to shape their culture. They need to shape their organization, their structure, their performance indicators.
ALISON BEARD: Is that lack of senior leadership, understanding, involvement, really organizing the company around projects, is the fact that it’s not yet that way the reason most projects still fail?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: I would say a big part of projects fail because of either the leadership doesn’t know what their role is, and they play a very important role in two ways: first, on prioritizing, deciding which projects go and which projects don’t go or how to cancel projects because this should be very natural. It doesn’t happen, but these are the senior leaders who decide.
Once you decide to launch an initiative or a project, you need to get involved as well. That means dedicating part of your time to pushing forward projects that often go across department, across the world, and they don’t do that enough. So that’s the two big areas where the leaders should be playing a more active role.
ALISON BEARD: If an organization wants to move from a operational mindset to one that is much more project-oriented, what is the first step?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: I talk about culture. I think for me, the first step is understanding that your culture has to be different. And by culture, I mean that failure, it’s possible that some of the projects will fail and you need to embrace it, allowing people to take risks. I also think that most of the projects that we do currently in organizations across the world, they’re incremental improvements.
The nice part about projects, they allow you to think exponentially. So allowing people to think broad and the sponsorship should be going along that. So the first step is working on your culture, allowing a more project-driven culture so that people get comfortable with the things I just mentioned.
ALISON BEARD: For companies that have already moved to a very traditional organizational structure to something like Agile, how is this the next step? How is this an evolution from that?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Well, I think Agile has been great and Agile has been there for 20 years and I think majority of companies have embraced some of the Agile philosophy or principles, which is about customer centricity, not so much around the process. They work in smaller teams, not huge teams, and they also work on iterations, so disrupting a bit, like you were saying, Alison, the more traditional hierarchical, silo-based organizations. But that’s not enough to bring an organization to feel comfortable with change, to be good at transformation, constant transformation. For that, you need something bigger.
And that’s where I came with the concept of project-driven, where take some of the philosophy of Agile, but brings it at scale. So you can work with transversal teams, you can do transformation one after the other.
This is just bringing a different way of working, a different organization type to embrace what I call the transformation edge. We are living in a world of change and that will not go backwards, unfortunately. Where in the past, operations was the core part of your business where most of the value was generating, producing, selling products or services, in this project-based organization, the projects becomes your core value drivers. Your operations become more like a commodity. You need to have them, but it should not be the core focus or the core place where you spend most of your time.
ALISON BEARD: And it might be obvious, but the driver of this is the rapid pace of technological change.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: The rapid pace of change, the rapid pace of new technology, the rapid pace of new disruptions, but there’s another big point. Most of the operational work, so basically people that do the same all the time when they go to work, they work with the same people, they do very similar activities all the time, that work will be done very soon by robots and AI.
So the piece of operations that used to have the majority of humans working on that, that’s going to disappear. So in banks, for example, today, there’s very few people working in the operations. This is all run by IT and technology. So the future of work is project-based. We’re going to just jump and spend time on projects as our core time area, not operations.
We should not be doing operational task anymore. So that’s the other big change, Alison, that the type of work is shifting from operations-based, repetitive, very focused, to more project-based, which is more fluid. We don’t know what will happen in six months, so you don’t have roles for two years, and it’s a bit uncomfortable, but brings a lot of opportunities.
ALISON BEARD: So rather than laying all those people off because their operational work can be automated, you’re redeploying them to innovation, and the one thing that humans still do better than AI, which is create something new.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Absolutely. So that’s a core message. And the research that I found was when you do this transformation, it’s not about getting rid of your operational people. And there will be thousands of people that will need to be redeployed. So the key success factor is that you give these people the opportunity to transform themselves, to do repetitive tasks, to do some more challenging innovation.
I think in the end, we’re all a bit creative. And that’s the big, big message I want to share is don’t see this as a cost-cutting exercise. It’s not. It’s about re-skilling, upskilling. And the companies that I talk about in the book, that’s what they did. One of them, Haier, very famous for their business model. They have lots of entrepreneurs, micro-enterprises.
And you allow people to have even more meaningful work because you know, Alison, people don’t go to work because they’re passionate; they go because they need the money. So we can give more meaning to the people when they’re working on something that has impact, where they’re empowered to take decisions. They might benefit from the returns. So I think that’s for me the really positive side, but the change and the jump is huge.
ALISON BEARD: Let’s dig into what companies need to do to move to this more project-driven model. You talk about three buckets: organizational redesign, leadership, and value creation. Let’s start with the first. How does an organization need to redesign itself to make this work?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: So there’s three aspects I cover here. It’s the culture. We talked about having that more facility for people to take risks and failures is regularly rewarded and also exponential mindset so that we think beyond the traditional improvements. The second and the most difficult for me is the structure. Structure means hierarchy, and hierarchy is power. And I think leading change has to come from the top. So people are not so free with giving their power away.
So the structure is the worst thing that can happen if you want to lead projects transversely because it slows you down. The last piece on that bucket is governance. Governance is the big meetings that leaders have to follow up progress. It has been very operationally-driven, monthly review meetings, annual review meetings, and so on. It has to be much more flexible.
ALISON BEARD: You said the most difficult one is the hierarchy, the structure. So what advice do you give organizations on that?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: So this is interesting because that’s where you get the bigger resistance. And often you get resistance from the people and employees and middle managers. Here you get resistance from the top because you’re telling them, “Okay, you need to work differently.” My advice is start small. So don’t go the next day and say, “Today we’re not going to have any hierarchy in this company and there’s no job descriptions. We’ll figure out.”
No. What you want to do is take one of the most important transformation initiatives that you’re doing and that team you empower fully. They can decide 90% of the things they can make decisions, they can move fast. They might check with one senior leader, the sponsor once in a while, but you leave them freedom and they get priority on any of their requests. So you experiment with one only, and that will lead to good results.
And people will say, “Oh, what’s going on there? This is going fast and this is really nice.” So it will create a snowball effect, but don’t try remove hierarchy from one day to another because that’s really chaos. Start small but show that this snowball effect can lead the rest of the organization towards that more project-based organization.
ALISON BEARD: In the second bucket, leadership, how does leadership change from the CEO all the way down to the line manager?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: That’s for me the one that can have the bigger impact. From my experience talking to large organizations, senior leaders, somehow they prefer to spend most of their time, including the CEOs, on the things they already know. I call it their comfort zone. And their comfort zone for senior leaders is running the business, running the operations. Most of them came to the ranks through the ranks through operations because they were very good at one piece of the operations, the finance, the operations itself, the sales.
And they really feel very uncomfortable when they have to work in transformation initiatives because they need to really become leaders without hierarchies and contribute and share ideas and let other people take decisions. For me, the leaders is where the biggest change can happen is how much of your week do you spend in change projects and transformation?
We did research for the book and it was really about most of 80% of the senior leaders were spending less than half a day in transformation work, four days and a half on day-to-day activities, operations. Right, and I would say at least half of your time, if not more, three days out of it, you need to spend it in that zone where every day is different. There’s a lot of uncertainties. You need quick decision-making. Maybe you don’t have clarity on the status, but you need to keep pushing. Sometimes you need to stop the project.
For me, that’s the biggest piece on the leadership. It includes prioritization. That’s the other big topic. You need to say no. You need to say, these are the top three initiatives that we’re going to invest in this next six months. And unfortunately, leaders struggle with that as well. They want to do everything and hope one or two will succeed. People cannot cope with that. We need to be more strong on the priorities. I call it ruthless prioritization.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Another term you use is strategic fluidity, which sounds highly uncomfortable if you’re a CEO or in the C-suite, because it’s really difficult to communicate a vision to your employees and your shareholders if you are being flexible about your strategy based on the results that you’re getting from these transformation projects. So how do you deal with that?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. So there’s much more uncertainty and you need much more trust. So this is you’re trusting the team, you’re trusting that at the end of the day, that’s where we will create the value. And I think this goes along what we just talked before, the speed of change. They were talking about big bets. You will not see immediate results in any project. It takes commitment to spend at least six months to start seeing some value.
And you see that from very successful companies where they focus more on the long-term. I think Amazon is one great example, no? They were looking at the long-term. The long-term. This is where we want to go. We want to be the best on that piece. We want to build this transformation capacity so that we can adapt. So we’re measuring performance differently. And this is where, again, boards, shareholders, they need to be more patient. They need to trust that if the elements are in place, we’re going to be successful in the midterm, in the long-term.
ALISON BEARD: On the prioritization piece, what recommendations do you give about how senior leaders first decide what projects to start because you want them to be focused and targeted and not say yes to everything? And then secondly, decide when something needs a little bit more time or actually, you should just cut your losses?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. And we had an article in HBR about this on stopping projects, but let me bring it very simple to the listener. I asked two questions to a board of directors or executives, “How often do you launch new initiatives, new projects in your organization?” They say, “Maybe we launch twice per month.”
And they’re very proud because launching projects mean that you’re taking risks, you’re innovative. But then I ask, “How often do you finish them or you close them?” And they look to each other, say, “Maybe I think the last time we finished a project was six months ago.” So if you launch more projects than you finish, you have a big problem because capacity is already at its full. So knowing that before we launch a new initiative, we need to stop two or three to give space within the organization, that is already a big game-changer.
People will notice that first we finish what we start or we stop it because it’s possible that we wanted to invest in this technology, and six months later there’s something better, cheaper, and more performing. So this is really important. I always say that today I can go to any organization and we could cancel 80% of the projects and nothing will happen. That’s another exercise that you can go do, try to cancel 80% of the projects.
And I use the purpose. The purpose is very important to prioritize. What’s the purpose of our business? Because the goals might change, but your purpose should not change. So if you use your purpose to be the best on something, be recognized for something, that will help you to eliminate almost half of your projects and the new ones should be linked to that big focus, which is your purpose.
ALISON BEARD: And you’re describing this very fluid world, very innovative world, and I understand your point about how employees will feel energized by that, but also it’s quite uncomfortable. There’s value in doing something that you’ve done for a really long time well, as opposed to this new world where I’m assigned to one project and it might be successful, but if it’s not, I’m going to move to another one. So when you’ve worked with companies on these kinds of changes, how have you seen in terms of how the employees react and how do leaders bring them along to make sure that they are enjoying it?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Well, I think you touched on one of the most critical pieces, and it has connotations on human resources, on the future of work, on the type of work that people will be doing. And I give you just a personal example, Alison. A very good friend was working in a big French bank, global bank. He was doing 25 years of the same. He was head of risk management for loans and mortgages.
And at one point, the bank decided, “We don’t need people here. I think we can do all this with IT and automation.” So they called my friend, say, “As from tomorrow, you and your team will be replaced, will be displaced.” And he got into big transformation projects across Europe. And he called me, he said, “Antonio, I’ve never been working in projects full-time. Can you help me? I’m scared. I like the day-to-day. I was very good.”
And then I sent him, of course, the HBR handbook and he loved that. And just two months later, he told me, “Antonio, can we talk?” I say, “Yes, I love my new job. I’m meeting people from all over the place. They’re all different. Every day is different. There’s challenges. I’m using my brain. We’re working in teams.”
So I think I would say the majority people, if you support them from transitioning from repetitive tasks to something that requires for them to use their skills and their knowledge and working in teams. Human people, we love to work in teams when people trust us and we have a role to play, it just leads to a more meaningful job. But I’m afraid that some leaders will see this as a cost-cutting exercise, and that will put people in resistance, scare mode, and that should not be. I think the future of work based on projects can be really meaningful and personal growth is huge.
ALISON BEARD: And it sounds like you’re advocating for people to do this with internal talent rather than hiring gig workers or using consultants. You see the project-driven organization as still providing full-time employment to people?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Yeah. And this is something that I highlight with some big corporates, we discussed this. And for the last 20 years, maybe since change became such an important… and transformation became so pressing, most large companies, mid-size companies, they have outsourced their transformation work to consultants. And they were doing the big changes while the internal people were doing the day-to-day, and they were comfortable with that.
If there’s one big thing that leaders need to know in the next year or two is build those transformation capabilities, I call it transformation muscles within their people. They need to get comfortable with change. They need to thrive in change and in transformation and in projects. We still need consultants, not to do the heavy lifting of transformation, but to give you some advice, to do some coaching and mentoring.
But I think that’s the bigger change I see is companies and leaders need to build their transformation muscles urgently, otherwise they will struggle, for sure. And just to finish on this point, if you look globally, Asia companies, they’re already there. They’re already there. They have lean structures, they have their transformation capabilities within, their leaders know what to do. And I’m a bit worried based in Europe, in Spain, and looking at North America, that we take things a bit slow. And so I’m a bit afraid that we need to move faster.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So that brings us nicely to the third bucket of things that need to shift within your organization to be more project-driven value creation. So what needs to change specifically there?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: So here there’s two main areas. We still need operations, you still need to produce your goods or deliver your services. But what I say is this has to be less core and more modular. So how can we buy capacity externally? It happens in some industries. You don’t have all the full capacity. So having that flexibility for your operations, being able to insource, outsource. Operations are needed, but it shouldn’t be the focus and it should be much more flexible.
And the second is about execution. So here is about how can we generate value faster? Here you introduce artificial intelligence to deliver more of the tasks that currently are done by the people. So all the admin, some decision-making, risk analysis, this can be done by AI. So the execution piece to go faster, create more value for the organization or for society. But it’s about which methods do we use. We have the project canvas that I cover in my earlier book, but also some ideas around you should never have projects longer than six months because the world changes so fast. So having some new concepts and tools for leaders and people working in transformation to make them better.
ALISON BEARD: So it’s always iterative?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Always iterative, always having margin for stopping a project, always having the opportunity to accelerate. And what are the tools that work and supporting people building those competencies and executing their projects successfully? Because that’s another big issue, around 80% of transformation work fails. So if you do half of it better, you’re going to be better. So how can we do that?
ALISON BEARD: What tangible benefits have you seen when companies have reorganized this way, shifted their leadership, started measuring and creating value in a different way?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: There’s financial benefits. For example, Haier, a Chinese conglomerate who’s in consumer goods, electronics, and they move very quickly. They’re example for me in the book, and in this new model, they triple the profit within five years. So there’s really profit tangible. Bayer, the German company that produces the aspirins, they also are moving into this concept. They’re aiming to reduce cost by two billion by replacing and working in small teams for 90 days self-directed.
Another and last one I want to share, I like SpaceX for their dedicated teams. They had fully dedicated. And their exponential thinking. They said, “Why don’t we build rockets that you can reuse instead of dropping them?” So that exponential thinking has brought SpaceX to something we’ve never seen.
But the most important benefit that I see across the companies that I research for the book is people are proud to work for those companies. They’re proud. I go to work and I love it, and I’m doing something with meaning. It just makes me really happy when you can see people enjoying what they do at work. That for me, the cherry or the core driver for these changes is also that, the people being proud and fully satisfied with the work they do.
ALISON BEARD: What are some of the other really big challenges where you’ve seen organizations who try to do this stumble or fail?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: I think not being full in, it’s a big issue. Being patient as well. These changes require some time, maybe six months, give it nine months to start seeing some results and seeing some positive and some benefit. So that lack of patient, it’s a big issue, lack of sponsorship from the top. If the leaders say we go this direction, but they don’t behave like that, it’s a big, big challenge.
And the cultural aspects as well, Alison. People are afraid of change unless we really are clear, transparent as this change is for real, this change is needed. Back to the COVID, we knew it was urgent and it was a survival thing. So we all changed and we accepted the change. In a matter of a day or two, we were all working from home and helping each other. So this is a bit similar.
We need to see this as a very necessary change for organizations, for ourselves, for our careers to be in the right place where I think the future is leading us. And that would be the bigger challenge, the cultural aspects.
ALISON BEARD: And for those listeners who aren’t in the C-suite of their companies, is it possible to move to this type of model on a single team or within a certain function or region, even if it’s not a company-wide transformation and then try to filter it up?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: I think so. I’ve seen cases where somebody takes a role in a transformation leader position in the region and they say, “I want to try this. I want to have fully dedicated team. I want to empower the teams. I want to take decisions. I want to move fast. I want to evolve.” So you can try it and you can say, “I want to be the guinea pig. I want to be the MVP. I want to try it.”
And I would recommend highly for anybody listening to us who has this role of project leader, transformation leader, to be courageous enough to talk to your leaders, say, “Listen, I want to try this. I want to take the risk. And by the way, I need you, senior leader, to support me as well. There’s a big role that you can play. This is what I expect from you. Let’s work together. It’s not for me. It’s not for you. It’s for the company that we work.”
And I think this is the nice thing about projects that you have a lot of power in terms of stopping a project, instead of asking for help, instead of getting resources from parts of the organization. And we need to see your role much more broader than just delivering one project. We can make change happen in the organization.
ALISON BEARD: We can make change happen. Well, we all need to do that. So Antonio, thank you for helping us figure out how to do it.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Thank you, Alison. Always a pleasure.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, author of the HBR article, The Project-Driven Organization, and the book Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age.
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Thanks to our team, senior producer, Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
