Gonglomerate
An organization where silos keep each other hostage.
Read the ideaA new book by Kimmo Kontra & Janne Vihervuori Technics Publications · Out now
Corporate Stockholm Syndrome
How to Free Your Enterprise and Lead with AI
Stockholm, 1973.
Your office, today.
Only one large transformation in 200 hits budget, schedule and promised benefits. The reason is not bad luck — it is a hostage situation. This book shows leaders how to break out.
Paperback · Kindle · Audiobook · All formats and stores
“A must-read for corporate leaders!”
This book starts with a number
1:200
One large project in two hundred lands on budget, on schedule and delivers the benefits it promised.
Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg’s database of more than 16,000 large projects is so consistent that he calls it the Iron Law of Megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits — over and over again. Only 8.5% land on budget and on time. IT is the worst category of the lot.
Better tools. Better methods. Agile, digital, dashboards. The number does not move. We argue it is not bad luck, bad managers or bad vendors. It is the system performing to specification.
The diagnosis
Nobody is holding the gun.
- The hostages
- Your best people. Bright, well-meaning, highly trained — and quietly used to projects that miss.
- The captor
- Not the CIO, not the vendors, not “the culture”. The fragmented way the organization knows itself: strategy in slides, processes in diagrams, real work in shadow spreadsheets.
- Stockholm behavior
- Defending the delay. Explaining the failure away. Closing ranks against anyone who questions it. The abnormal now has a steering committee.
Not a technology book.
AI is the forcing function — the thing that finally makes change possible, and urgent. But the protagonist is the organization and its people, and the antagonist is the structural fragmentation no previous reform has fixed. This is a book about strategy, intent and management.
The ideas
Seven ideas to free an enterprise
The book moves from diagnosis to cure. Each idea has a page of its own — short enough for a coffee break.
The diagnosis
The Fallacy of One
One platform. One suite. One partner. One “solution.” The relief in the room is the tell.
The quiet, collective conviction that a single system, vendor or methodology will save you from the messy reality of your own complexity. It won’t.
Read the ideaThe shift
Abundance & Scarcity
AI makes candidates cheap. Commitment stays expensive.
Read the ideaThe cure
The Organizational Brain
A maintained, human-owned record of what the company wants — and why.
Read the ideaThe Infinite Optionality Engine
Put the enterprise in the conditional.
With the Brain in place, AI makes strategic alternatives cheap to create, compare, challenge and keep alive. Not an oracle — an ensemble of futures, with the assumptions showing.
Read the ideaGreenfield Thinking
Don’t shrink the company. Strip it.
Read the ideaOrchestration Governance
Govern the seams, not just the silos.
Read the ideaGonglomerate Check
Tick 3+? It’s you.
The five symptoms of a Gonglomerate — an organization where silos keep each other hostage. Tick the ones you recognize. Be honest; nobody is watching (really: nothing leaves your browser).
Praise
What leaders say
Today’s organizations are unfit for data and AI. Making them fit is THE management challenge of our time!
“You had me at ‘1 in 200.’”
“The great risk is that we use AI to build faster horses.”
“Most strategies die in PowerPoint.”
“Familiar, funny, and genuinely thought-provoking at the same time.”
Ville VoipioChair of the Board, Vaisala “We may simply become much better at producing the wrong things faster.”
Riku HelanderCEO, Digita “Essential reading before launching your next transformation.”
Pirkka PalomäkiFounding Partner, Maki.vc “If processes, data and ways of working don’t change, AI will just amplify the problems.”
Niko KorteVP Fossil Free Business Platforms, SSAB “Any board member or leader without an engineering background will chuckle at the many relevant examples.”
Jan Ludvig AndreassenChief Economist, Eika Gruppen
Field Notes
Dispatches from the vault
Short pieces and cartoons from the making of the book — first posted on LinkedIn, collected here so they don’t scroll away.
The authors