Now, the architectural blueprint for renovating culture in today’s world.

Leading change just became a whole lot easier.

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.

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.

“Phil Gilbert helped redefine how we thought about change at IBM — treating it like a product people chose to adopt, rather than a mandate to follow. Irresistible Change distills that approach into a powerful, practical playbook.”

Ginni Rometty
Former Chairman, President, and CEO of IBM
and best-selling author of Good Power

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.

Excerpt from Chapter 3 - Designing the Leadership Team

I spent part of 2012 visiting with various companies to meet their designers and see what was working, and not working, for them. What surprised me most on those trips was the consistently high quality of the design teams I met with. In fact, the quality of the design teams at design-forward companies didn’t strike me as being very much superior to design teams at companies I regarded as design laggards. There was a stark difference, however, in how the non-designers at those companies spoke about their design teams. At the design-forward companies, there was a level of respect for design among non-designers, something I didn’t experience when visiting the design laggards.

I realized that this was perhaps the crucial difference: Those cultures that successfully exploit an attribute are those that value the attribute, not those that simply contain the attribute.

In order to stick, a change provocation—be it design or agile or artificial intelligence (AI), or the next big thing, whatever—must become a coveted value of everyone in the organization, and not simply a skill that some people have or a tool that some people use.

All of this meant that we would need to focus as much, if not more, attention on getting the culture to embrace the values of great design than we would on attracting designers to execute on it. Most efforts get this backwards. They spend more time on the mechanics of the change provocation and relatively little time on the cultural assimilation of the values behind the provocation.

All the choices we made from this point forward reflected the crucial relationship between design (our change provocation) and our culture (the values and default behaviors of an IBMer). It’s hard to convey what an enormous task this felt like at the time. To put it in perspective: for every 100 designers we’d add at IBM, we needed to somehow influence about 5,000 others, having each of them adopt new values that would drive interdisciplinary teaming, empathy, and all the rest.

What would that mean for Hallmark’s program architecture and our initial program conditions? What was the relationship between the new values we were introducing and the existing values as practiced? And because values and behaviors are not things learned—they’re things adopted—how could we possibly make this impact on the organization’s non-designers quickly and at scale? We needed changes to be inserted at almost the molecular level of the company’s value system. We needed culture change at IBM to go viral.

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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.