A brand you can trust.

Transformation is about values and character more than technology and methods. And that means your brand is critical to your program's success.

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.

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.

“This is simultaneously the most radical and most pragmatic story of transformation you will come across anywhere. It would appear ridiculously ambitious to attempt to change the culture of a company the size of IBM and yet Phil Gilbert helps us truly understand what it takes to drive large-scale cultural change through design thinking. Anyone with similar ambition should take careful notes.”

Tim Brown
Chair Emeritus of IDEO
and best-selling author of Change By Design

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!

Excerpt from Chapter 2 - Branding the Program

Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy discussing design in hypothetical terms or in isolation from the outcomes design can contribute to. A new culture isn’t borne from whole cloth; in fact, the stickiness of change will be determined based on how well the new is integrated with the parts of the existing culture that are worth keeping. It will be an 80/20 thing: you’ll only adjust perhaps 20 percent of the behaviors, but it will be the 80 percent most highly leveraged part of what emerges.

While thinking through all this—the poor quality of existing design efforts, the likelihood of counterfeits, and the need to reflect the “integrated new” versus just “design”—it hit me that our product needed a name.

By giving this thing its own brand name, we could put some space between our mission and all the wrong-headed notions about design and design thinking that were swimming in our colleagues’ heads. As we saw it, Hallmark was the perfect blank-slate word. [It] was a neutral shiny vessel into which we could pour the values of the Hallmark program and its teams. In the same way that you can’t separate the glamour of Jane Birkin from the limited edition Hermeś Birkin bag, we would attempt to fuse the many positive existing elements of IBM’s culture with the new provocations that our program brought to create something new, valuable, and desirable. Hallmark stood for more than design and design thinking; it would stand for everything else needed to deliver great outcomes, too. Hallmark would become the gold standard for how teams worked at IBM.

The Hallmark brand provided a sense of consistency, weight, and scale to what otherwise might have appeared to be a scattered group of unconnected projects and events. It unified the understanding of projects as diverse as a product team’s mainframe software update to an HR team’s rethinking the annual employee review experience.

As the number of Hallmark projects grew in year two and year three, they spanned an ever-greater number of user groups, technologies, and problem spaces. Their one common thread was that under the Hallmark brand, they were all executing a new way of work and a driving a common culture change agenda.

_____

Excerpted with permission from Irresistible Change: A Blueprint for Earning Buy-In and Breakout Success by Phil Gilbert. Copyright ©2025 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold

Irresistible Change is a registered trademark of Gilbert Workshop LLC. All rights reserved.