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The first wave of Irresistible Change events—across cities, podcasts, print and online articles, and national TV—was more energizing than I could have imagined. From the State Theater in Austin to the archives of the Eames Institute, from Brooklyn salons to the Bloomberg studio set, the conversations around culture, design, and change have been electric.

Thank you to everyone who showed up, hosted, shared, or simply said, “I see myself in this.” We’ve got more to come—especially in the Raleigh-Durham and DC areas (dates coming soon)—but for now, I wanted to mark this new year with a reflection on where change is headed next.

Because here’s the truth:

Everyone will adopt AI. But in 2026, we’ll find out who did it best.

Just like the internet defined the winners of the 2000s, this moment will separate those who use AI from those who transform through it. And once again, the difference won’t be strategy—everyone’s is the same! And it won’t be the technology—everyone’s is the same! The difference will be determined by those who master the tactics of changing culture. Team design. Systems that reward new behaviors. Leadership that earns buy-in.

That’s where we’re headed next. Let me know how I can help!

— Phil

PS: Thank you to everyone who’s bought the book and the many of you who gifted it to others over the holiday season. And a double thank you to those who’ve written reviews on Amazon... it means a ton to me (and, of course, for sales!)... if you have read the book and felt you got value from it, if you wouldn’t mind leaving a short review it really helps others discover it.

Click right here to find out where you can order the book, most anywhere in the world

“AI dramatically lowers the cost of generating artifacts—code, content, interfaces, analyses. When output becomes cheap, organizations don’t produce less. They drown in options.

In that environment, the bottleneck is no longer creation. It’s discernment. Knowing what to build, what to trust, and what to ignore. If your competitors can prototype every future, your edge comes from teams that know which future is worth pursuing.

That’s why AI doesn’t just require new tools. It demands a new architecture for teams. A shift in how we lead, design, and decide.”

Phil Gilbert

This Is A Prototype Podcast (link)

Recorded live at the State Theater, Austin, Texas

Links to other irresistible content!

Over the last two months, I’ve talked about Irresistible Change on 15 podcasts, more than two dozen “print” articles, and network TV. Here’s a few of them:

Fortune || The only constant is change—here’s how to sell it to your people [link]

Inc. || Why ‘Change Management’ Almost Always Fails (and How to Do It Right) [link]

Fast Company || This is why your attempts to change your company culture are failing—and how to fix it [link]

Stanford Social Innovation Review || If You Want People in the Office, Build One Worth Coming To [link]

PRINT Book Club with Debbie Millman & Steven Heller || Curiosity & Empathy at Scale (podcast) [link]

From The Green Notebook with Joe Byerly (podcast) [link]

Barry O’Reilly’s Unlearn (podcast) [link]

Disruptor Confessions with John Ayers (podcast) [link]

Bloomberg TV interview [link]

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“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.” - Lou Gerstner

I met Lou Gerstner twice, both times briefly.

The first was in 1998, when I was a vendor meeting with IBM leadership in Armonk. Lou was there. I shook his hand.

The second was almost two decades later. By then, I was at IBM, running what we called the Hallmark transformation program. After a team meeting at the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Center for Learning, I saw him walking alone from his office. I introduced myself, and we spoke briefly about culture and its role in transformation.

When I mentioned my formula — People + Practices + Places = Outcomes — he immediately recognized it as an evolution of his own Win. Execute. Team. framework. Maybe five minutes total.

That was it.

I didn’t spend much time with Lou Gerstner. But his ideas shaped decades of my work and the work of many leaders who came of age during his IBM tenure.

Two insights from Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? became foundational to how I approached large-scale change.

The first was his clarity about culture:

“You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.”

This wasn’t theory. It was practice. Mandates might move metrics in the short term, but real transformation requires something harder: creating conditions where teams choose to change because it makes sense in their context.

That insight shaped my conviction that change must be led like a product — something adopted because it adds value to the people doing the work. Compliance might satisfy a directive, but it rarely delivers the outcomes that justify the disruption.

Gerstner’s second insight was just as consequential: culture (and its change) can be measured.

Win. Execute. Team. wasn’t a slogan. It was a system, operationalized through performance management, leadership expectations, and reinforcement mechanisms that made behavior visible and consequential. Culture wasn’t treated as mystical or soft. It was treated as something that could be actively influenced and scaled — not by decree, but by design.

People + Practices + Places = Outcomes isn’t a metaphor. It’s an operating model. It’s a way to manage culture as a system, anchored to the outcomes that necessitated change in the first place. The work I describe in Irresistible Change builds directly on Gerstner’s core belief: culture isn’t unknowable — it’s shapeable when leaders take responsibility for the conditions they create.

This matters even more in the era we’re entering now.

AI is dramatically lowering the cost of execution. It can generate code, content, interfaces, and research at a scale and speed that would have been unimaginable during Gerstner’s tenure. But while AI changes how much work can be produced, it does not change what work matters. If anything, it raises the stakes.

When generation becomes cheap, judgment becomes the new scarce resource.

And that’s where Gerstner’s thinking feels prescient. AI does not replace the need for culture; it amplifies it. Without shared norms, clear incentives, and aligned teams, AI simply accelerates confusion. With them, it becomes a powerful aid to execution.

In other words, the same lesson applies: leaders don’t mandate outcomes. They design systems. They create conditions. And they trust teams to act within them.

I only spent minutes with Lou Gerstner. But ideas scale far beyond moments.

For those of us who have helped carry IBM through multiple eras of reinvention, his legacy isn’t just what he did in his moment, it’s how he thought about the relationship between culture and the systems that support it.

The ideas outlive the man. And they continue to scale.

Rest in peace, Lou.

Irresistible Change is a newsletter about organizational culture, transformation, and design. It’s written for executives who recognize that tools and methods come and go, but it’s culture that drives sustainable, differentiated outcomes. And that the status quo is a culture’s mortal enemy.

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Thursday, November 20 at the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity in Richmond, CA, we continued the Irresistible Change book tour in a place that feels both timeless and startlingly alive. It was a magical evening spent not just among the works of Ray and Charles Eames, but truly among the work — the ideas, prototypes, experiments, convictions, and restless curiosity that defined some of the most significant design contributions of the 20th century.

That’s the revelation of visiting the Eames Institute: you feel the process as much as you see the artifacts.

“Art resides in the quality of doing; process is not magic” - Charles Eames

Standing in that archive, surrounded by objects that carry both rigor and playfulness, the truth of that is unmistakable.

At this second San Francisco stop, I was joined by Llisa Demetrios, Charles and Ray’s granddaughter, along with John Cary and the rest of the extraordinary team at the Eames Institute. After a tour of the archives, we held a conversation about the IBM–Eames relationship and the ways that the Eames’ philosophy shaped IBM beginning in the 1950s and continuing straight through the transformation I led decades later.

In many ways, the very notion of making change irresistible traces back to one of Charles’ most powerful ideas:

“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host, anticipating the needs of his guests.”

That idea sat at the center of how we approached our work at IBM. In fact, here’s how I described it in the book:

Every aspect of your change program must embrace that guest–host relationship. Employees are not doing you a favor by participating; they are helping you achieve your mission. Treat them as valued guests, and they’ll walk through fire for you.

Toward the end of our conversation last night, we turned to the era we now find ourselves in — one defined by artificial intelligence and a sheer, disorienting abundance of data. It can feel overwhelming, much like the pointless man in Harry Nilsson’s The Point, who was surrounded by signposts pointing in every possible direction. As he says,

A point in every direction is the same as — as no point at all!

That’s what unfiltered AI acceleration is: endless possibility, yet with no direction home.

Someone in the audience asked “how do we navigate this moment?” I said I didn’t have a pat answer, but that when I faced such moments, I always find myself coming back to something deceptively simple: just do the work.

It’s in the action that we find our footing.

Sitting in that archive, surrounded by thousands of things but almost nothing that was “finished” — because nothing in the Eames world is ever finished — it becomes obvious. Everything is a prototype. A continuation. A gesture in a much longer arc. It reminded me of when Charles was asked

Is Design a creation of an individual? And he said “No, because to be realistic, one must always recognize the influence of those that have gone before.”

Doesn’t that imply progress, not just iteration? The future has never been a matter of random change; it has always been informed change — shaped by the prototypes, missteps, and insights of those who came before. There has always been noise, the inherent inability to see the path clearly. If the future were obvious, there would be no need for prototypes at all. Design exists because of that uncertainty. It is the discipline we use to navigate what can’t yet be fully understood.

I take comfort in that. Working through the noise — probing, shaping, clarifying — is the design process.

And this process matters even more now, as we approach a world where the tasks required to generate code-based artifacts — early prototypes, mockups, simulations — will increasingly be handled by AI. The cost of producing a digital artifact will approach zero. But reducing the cost of generation only increases the value of judgment.

Which brings me back to Charles’ words from the 1972 film Design Q&A:

Can the computer substitute for the designer? “Probably, in some special cases, but usually the computer is an aid to the designer.”

And later:

Is [Design] a method of general expression? “No — it is a method of action.”

Tools will evolve. Some tasks the designer once owned will be automated. But Design — the thoughtful, step-by-step act of making sense of complexity — will remain human.

And I believe the winners that emerge after the AI tooling transformation will be those that double down on Design. Because that will be the dominant human skill required to surface the remaining value humans bring to outcomes.

Indeed, for digital interfaces, it may be the only human skill that truly matters by the end of this century.

(This article originally published on LinkedIn by author on November 25, 2025)

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Last night’s CPS Lectures event was a special stop on the book tour. Founded by my good friends Kelly and John Close in memory of her father, who was a voracious reader and generous conversationalist, they’ve hosted more than 160 authors in their home. Being #167 was an honor, but the real joy was reconnecting with old friends in a room built for honest, unguarded dialogue. (Notwithstanding disco interludes from DJ bØ9ü$!)

Because of that intimacy, we were able to dig into a question that hasn’t surfaced much on the tour:

If change is a product, what does that demand of the leadership team?

It’s a good question, and one that gets its own chapter in Irresistible Change. But last night surfaced a related question I don’t address directly in the book, and I heard it twice, both from leaders inside government organizations:

If consultants are the ones leading the change effort, does that alter the Irresistible Change model?

Interestingly, not really. After all, the whole model is built on solving a very specific problem: How do you get 400,000 people to do something when none of them report to you? Whether the “you” is an employee or a contractor matters far less than people assume.

Of course, that statement needs a qualifier. I’m not suggesting that any outsider can lead a major change effort; or that this can be a part time role. It can’t. What I am saying is that what matters most isn’t employment status—it’s the person’s remit and their capability. If the change leader is explicitly empowered, and if they build the leadership team with the right design principles, the model still holds.

The more important questions are:

• Does the leader operate like a startup CEO/product leader, able to make decisions, lead people, and orchestrate across domains? They can’t simply be “the expert” in the change provocation being inserted.

• Is the leadership team built not only to advance the change provocation (e.g. AI, Design, Agile), but also to protect it from legacy systems that will inevitably push back?

• Does the team include people responsible for two simultaneous missions: delivering the program to incoming teams, and modernizing the scaled systems—HR, Finance, Communications, CIO—so the organization can sustain the new behaviors over time?

Because here’s the fundamental truth: what leaders think is the work is almost never the real work.

Introducing new tools, methods, or team practices is the visible part. But at least half the effort lies in changing the deeper systems that reinforce culture. Those systems—performance management, incentives, career ladders, budgeting, governance, decision rights—are the real levers of lasting change.

At IBM, our change program was called Hallmark. And the leadership team’s job wasn’t just helping thousands of teams adopt new ways of working; it was hacking, updating, and ultimately rewiring the underlying systems so those new behaviors could persist. The glamorous part wasn’t the work. The plumbing was.

I’ll let these words from Chapter 3 of Irresistible Change take it home:

The Irresistible Change® newsletter is about organizational culture, transformation, and design. It’s written for executives who recognize that tools and methods come and go, but it’s culture that drives sustainable, differentiated outcomes. And that the status quo is a culture’s mortal enemy.

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This is the 1st of a series of reflections on the launch events for my book, Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success. You can learn more about it here.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, at Salotto.nyc, I shared an unforgettable evening in Brooklyn’s premier design salon, where the conversation turned to what it really means to make design count inside the enterprise. Along with Joni Saylor, Seth Johnson and Gabriele Rossi, I shared a perspective on something I’ve been asked for years: “How do designers get a seat at the table?” In my experience, the biggest gap isn’t craft. It’s not talent, or aesthetic, or even process. It’s how designers communicate their value to the rest of the organization.

Too often, the impulse is to explain why “design is important.” But inside an enterprise, evangelism isn’t what earns power — the value of your work does. While we might hope that work speaks for itself, it doesn’t. We need to translate. And the truth is, many designers only know how to communicate as designers, great in rooms full of people who already understand design. But in front of skeptics, or simply colleagues with different incentives, we default to a design-centric pitch that misses the mark.

My view is simple: the most effective designers learn to speak business as a second language. Not to dilute the craft, but to amplify its relevance by presenting it in the context of the the business it’s a part of. This makes it intelligible and influential where it matters.

While leading the transformation of IBM, here’s one of the many things my team did to help establish this language, excerpted from the book:

As a follow-on question, someone asked what advice I’d give to people considering a career in design. There are a hundred ways to answer that question, but I simply shared what I would do if I had a new life in front of me:

“I’d get an undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Chicago, and then an MFA in Design from a school that fit my needs.”

Yesterday, I received a DM from someone who loved that answer but they were well past the student stage and asked instead: “What economics books would you recommend?”

It caught me a little off guard.

What I value about Economics has never been the formulas or models. It’s that Economics is the most expansive of the “business” disciplines. It comes closest to Arts and Literature. It cultivates a creative mindset — one that requires you to think in systems, understand incentives, and make sense of complexity. It’s the art of business, if you will.

So my book recommendations aren’t Economics 101. They’re the books that get to the spirit of what I meant, not the literal course list. They speak to the systems of power which must be the domain of design. And while I’m sure I’ll forget ten that are better, here are the ones I still have on my bookshelf today…

• Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk - Peter L. Bernstein

• Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution - Geoffrey A. Moore (really anything by GAM. Crossing the Chasm, etc. but Dealing with Darwin always especially stuck with me)

• Take on the Street: What Wall St. and Corporate America Don’t Want You to Know / What You Can Do to Fight Back - Arthur Levitt

• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less - Barry Schwartz

• And one that’s really off the wall but I fit squarely in the “this is the economic history of the western world”... The three volume series The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World - Neal Stephenson

Enjoy your winter reading (starting with my book!). And remember, design gains power not by insisting on its importance but by meeting the organization on its own terms. Only then can you hope to reshape those terms, and establish design’s proper role and influence.

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Thank you for choosing to stay on this newsletter list.

After the first couple of emails went out, I’ve heard from so many folks I hadn’t connected with in years. It’s been fun to reconnect with relationships from 20, 30, even 40 years ago. And some of you asked about the cover design. Well, I happen to know a few designers...

One of them, my friend Ryan Caruthers, graciously agreed to help with the book’s design. You’ll have to buy the book to see the whole jacket but it would be worth the price just to have Ryan’s work on your shelf. The book is basically free.

Ryan came to IBM from Nike where he worked on Michael Jordan’s brand. And today he heads global design and brand for Culligan, the water company.

The idea of brand is actually a critical part of any culture change. In this month’s excerpt (below), you’ll get a flavor for how brand can help build a program’s desirability and power.

Thanks again for being part of a community that’s been proving change can be irresistible — and for continuing to push it forward, and I hope I’ll see you at one of the launch events: Irresistible Change® Live!

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In 1995, Steve Jobs explained why so many big ideas fall short. He said: “It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.”

Exactly. And the same is true for organizational transformation. Every major change effort starts with a good reason and often with the right strategy. So why do most fail?

Irresistible Change is not just a book about strategy—it’s a blueprint for execution. It captures the key operational decisions that made IBM’s culture transformation stick, at global scale. Not just the why, but the how.

Here’s how the book is structured:

1. Setting the Stage

2. Branding the Program

3. Designing the Leadership Team

4. Selecting the First Projects

5. Driving the Adoption

6. Communicating the Progress

7. Finding the Magic

8. Raising the Money

9. Building the Environment

10. Finishing the Job

Each chapter focuses on one of the specific, replicable moves we made to help IBM—a 400,000 person company—work faster, think differently, and build a more human-centered way of operating.

If you’re navigating change in your own organization, or advising someone who is, this framework is built to scale. And it’s available for pre-order now.

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For years, people have asked me to put IBM’s transformation story — and the lessons from it — into a book. I finally did. It’s called Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success, and you can find out where to purchase it here.

Whether we’ve worked together directly, or your path was shaped by the ripple effects of IBM’s design and transformation work, this book captures the mindset and methods we used to make culture a competitive advantage. Ordering it is a small gesture that helps carry those ideas forward — at a moment when organizations need them more than ever.