The Case For Becoming a Project-Based Org

AI is transforming the world, and it starts with the right compute. Arm is the AI compute platform trusted by global leaders, proudly NASDAQ listed, built for the future. Visit arm.com/discover. I'm Allison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast. 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. So we talk about that a lot. Right? We need to be more nimble, but how do you actually do that? 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. So that sounds really positive and it sounds different from the traditional model of maintaining and growing operations, managing talent. It also sounds really hard. 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 and 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. Thank you for inviting me. So project management has been your life's work for decades. What is different now in early twenty twenty six than even a few years ago in terms of how companies need to think about projects. Allison, I'm sure you've experienced that too. I think you see more projects, and you see longer projects, projects that never end. Right? 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 …