When organizations struggle with workload demands—whether in the private sector to enable growth or in public agencies to manage expanding missions—the instinct is often to request, budget for, and onboard additional staff. While understandable, this reflex reflects a narrow approach to supporting growth and transformation—one that prioritizes or relies solely on staffing adjustments over operational improvements.

Manufacturing transformations fail at an alarming rate—not simply because of poor execution on the shop floor but because of a deeper, more systemic issue that few organizations address: the divide between manufacturing and commercial operations.

In federal agencies, disruption isn't just an occasional visitor - it's a permanent resident. Yet there's a pervasive myth that government operations can somehow remain insulated from disruption. This false sense of stability, entrenched by rigid organizational structures and traditional management approaches, actually creates hidden vulnerabilities that become glaringly apparent during times of stress.

What differentiates successful integrations from most consolidation efforts is their successful avoidance of the misconception that often frames these efforts. Leaders often fixate on only the obvious inefficiencies—duplicate administrative functions, redundant systems, and overlapping facilities. While important, this surface-level view misses the deeper transformation potential.

Policy tsunamis. That's how many federal executives describe the waves of change that crash through their agencies during administrative transitions. While some policy shifts reveal themselves through early warning signs - mounting OIG findings, congressional scrutiny, or misalignment between capabilities and stakeholder expectations - others can arrive with startling suddenness, like executive directives that fundamentally reshape priorities overnight.

If you’re still only sending up trial balloons or, worse yet, simply standing still on AI, you are falling behind. Most organizations recognize this. That’s why many across both the private and public sectors are moving quickly to plan, implement, and extract value from their AI initiatives. But moving fast, without purpose and a proper foundation, may be just as damaging as standing still.

For corporations and federal agencies alike, the era of Band-Aid solutions to process-related challenges should have ended long ago. Operational excellence requires both - doing current things better while fundamentally reimagining how organizations execute on their core mission to deliver superior outcomes.

Private and public sector organizations must both worry about market leadership and operational excellence. Often dismissed as mere cost centers, support functions represent an overlooked and underleveraged source of efficiency and effectiveness gains for both types of organizations.

Are your program metrics truly capturing mission impact, or are they simply tracking activities? Our comprehensive approach to measurement doesn't just satisfy reporting requirements - it drives genuine program improvement and helps ensure federal investments deliver meaningful results.

AI is all the buzz. Beneath all this noise lies a stark reality: Most organizations are relatively paralyzed, converting genuine urgency into empty talk while their relevance quietly erodes and the competition’s lead compounds.

Federal leaders: The halls of your agencies are thick with uncertainty right now. While wariness is natural, how your organization emerges from this period - stumbling or thriving - depends entirely on the groundwork you lay today. Here are three proven lessons from agencies that turned transitions into opportunities.

We believe that failure rate is not due to lack of effort or resources, but because of how organizations respond when performance begins deteriorating. Having worked with a wide range of businesses in distress, we’ve observed how successful turnarounds demand both surgical precision and enterprise-wide perspective - a balance few organizations achieve, especially when pressured by oversimplified external advice.

The traditional S curve is changing, as technology and government regulations reshape markets, creating terminal points for essential decision making.

Turnarounds and strategic transformations often go hand-in-hand, with an organization needing to retool its operations and strengthen its core through a turnaround...

There’s a strong push for innovation within the federal government, driven not only by desire but also by mandate. The success of these efforts relies on a systematic approach to planning and implementing change, encompassing phases like strategy development, prioritization, defining necessary changes, enabling change, and ongoing governance. This approach is critical for achieving impactful and sustainable innovation in federal programs and initiatives.

By deepening our understanding of and anticipating what’s happening within our markets, we can tap into new sources of differentiation that account for the fact that the world has changed and that thriving in that post-Pandemic world isn’t simply business as usual or business as it was.

Transformation and modernization efforts remain vital and at the forefront of organizations’ agendas, as they aim to spark step-change performance improvement.

The traditional S curve is changing, as technology and government regulations reshape markets, creating terminal points for essential decision making.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) trends create risks and also opportunities for savvy institutional investors…

Traditional approaches to Transformation, with an over-reliance on consultants, fail to generate the best outcomes …