We like to believe that whatever ails a company can be fixed by digitising it. And technology is easy to swap. Rip out the old system, bolt in the new one, declare yourself modern. But a company is not its buildings, its machines, or its software. It is the people in it. Organizations do not change. People change or they quietly refuse to, and no amount of technology overrides that.

I learned this the hard way, leading corporate restructuring as a CFO and a CEO. You can redraw an org chart over lunch. Getting the human beings inside it to actually move forward is the real job, and there is no tool that will do it for you. The recent return-to-office wave is showing this right now, at enormous scale.

Through 2025 and into 2026, the big employers ordered everyone back. Amazon, around 350,000 people, full-time. JPMorgan Chase, remote work gone. Dell, hybrid scrapped. Mass change programs, imposed from the top, and look what they produced. Corporate guidance firm Gartner found nearly three quarters of HR leaders reporting internal tension.

Eight in ten companies admitted losing talent. And the number that says it all: required office time went up 12 percent between 2024 and 2025, while actual attendance rose 1 to 3 percent. People badged in. They withheld everything else.

That gap, between turning up and actually caring, is the whole subject of the “People” block in my book.

So let me say something unfashionable. Humans are creatures of habit. We claim to love change. We don’t. When it gets hard, most of us want stability and a predictable routine, and that includes your best employees.

Management, busy improving systems and chasing results, often never even notices that people are still walking the old paths in their........

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