The Case For Becoming a Project-Based Org

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1:21I'm Alison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:32Adi, 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.

2:15So 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.

2:54So here's my conversation with Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, CEO of Projects & 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.

3:12Antonio, thanks so much for being on the show.

3:15Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:Thank you for inviting me. So project management has been your life's work for decades. What is different now in early 2026 than even a few years ago in terms of how companies need to think about projects? Alison, I'm sure you've experienced that too. I think you see more projects and you see longer projects, projects that never end. 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, overloaded. And I think there's a need for doing projects, for sure. This is critical. Projects are your future, but in different ways.

4:00Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez: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 world has changed, so they also need to change and spend more time doing transformation work, projects. They need to shape their culture. They need to shape their organization, their structure, their performance indicators. Is that sort of lack of senior leadership, understanding, involvement, really organizing the company around project?

4:44Is the fact that it's not yet that way the reason most projects still fail?

4:49Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:I would say a big part of projects fail because of either the leadership doesn't know what their role is, and they play a very important role in two ways. First, on prioritizing, deciding which projects go and which projects don't go, or how to cancel projects because this should be very natural. It doesn't happen, but these are the senior leaders who decide. And then once you decide to launch an initiative or a project, you need to get involved as well. That means dedicating part of your time to pushing forward projects that often go cross-departmental, across the world. And they don't do that enough.

5:32Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:So that's the two big areas where the leaders should be playing a more active role. If an organization wants to move from sort of an operational mindset to one that is much more project oriented, what is the first step? I talk about culture. I think for me, the first step is understanding that your culture has to be different. And by culture, I mean that it's possible that some of the projects will fail and you need to embrace it, allowing people to take risks. I also think that most of the projects that we do currently in organizations across the world, they're incremental improvements. The nice part about projects, they allow you to think exponentially.

6:20Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:So allowing people to think broad and the sponsorship should be going along that. So the first step is working on your culture, allowing a more project driven culture so that people get comfortable with the things I just mentioned. For companies that have already moved to sort of a very traditional organizational structure to something like Agile, how is this the next step? Like, how is this an evolution from that? Well, I think Agile has been great and Agile has been there for 20 years. I think majority of companies have embraced some of the agile philosophy or principles, which is about customer centricity, not so much around the process.

7:05Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:They work in smaller teams, not huge teams. And they also work on iteration. So disrupting a bit, like you were saying, Alison, the more traditional, hierarchical, silo-based organizations. But that's not enough to bring an organization to feel comfortable with change, to be good at constant transformation. For that, you need something bigger. And that's where I came with the concept of project driven. Take some of the philosophy of agile, but brings it at scale. So you can work with transversal teams. You can do transformation one after the other. different. This is just bringing a different way of working, a different organization type to embrace what I call the transformation age.

7:54Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:We are living in a world of change and that will not go backwards, unfortunately. Where in the past operations were the core part of your business, where most of the value was generating, producing, selling products or services in this project-based organization, the projects becomes your core value drivers. Your operations become more like a commodity. You need to have them, but it should not be the core focus or the core place where you spend most of your time. And it might be obvious, but the driver of this is the rapid pace of technological change. The rapid pace of change, the rapid pace of new technology, the rapid pace of new disruptions.

8:40Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:But there's another big point. Most of the operational work, so basically people that do the same all the time when they go to work, they work with the same people, they do very similar activities all the time, that work will be done very soon by robots and AI. So the piece of operations that used to have the majority of humans working on that, that's going to disappear. So in banks, for example, today, there's very few people working in the operations. This is all run by IT and technology. So the future of work is project-based. We're going to just jump and spend time on projects as our core time area.

9:24Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:We should not be doing operation tasks anymore. So that's the other big change, Alison, that the type of work is shifting from operations-based, repetitive, very focused to more project-based which is more fluid we don't know what will happen in six months so you don't have roles for two years and it's a bit uncomfortable but brings a lot of opportunities so rather than laying all those people off because their operational work can be automated you're redeploying them to innovation and the one thing that humans still do better than AI which is create something new. Absolutely. So that's the core message.

10:08Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:And the research that I found was when you do this transformation, it's not about getting rid of your operational people. And there will be thousands of people that will need to be re-employed. So the key success factor is that you give these people the opportunity to transform themselves, to do repetitive tasks, to do some more challenging innovation. I think in the end, we're all a bit creative. And that's the big, big message I want to share is don't see this as a cost-cutting exercise. It's not. It's about re-skilling, up-skilling. And the companies that I talk in the book, that's what they did.

10:47Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:One of them, Hire, Hire, very famous for their business model. They have lots of entrepreneurs, micro-enterprises. And you allow people to have even more meaningful work because, you know, Alison, people don't go to work because they're passionate. They go because they need the money. So we can give more meaning to the people work when they're working on something that has impact, where they're empowered to take decisions. They might benefit from the returns. That's for me the really positive side. But the change and the jump is huge. Let's dig into what companies need to do to move to this more project-driven model.

11:28You talk about three buckets, organizational redesign, leadership, and value creation. Let's start with the first. How does an organization need to redesign itself to make this work?

11:40Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:So there's three aspects I cover here. It's the culture. We talk about that, having that more facility for people to take risks and failures is regularly rewarded and also exponential mindset so that we think beyond the traditional improvements. The second and the most difficult for me is the structure. Structure means hierarchy and hierarchy is power. And I think leading change has to come from the top. So people are not so free giving their power away. So the structure is the worst thing that can happen if you want to lead projects transversally because it slows you down. The last piece on that bucket is governance.

12:25Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:Governance is the big meetings that leaders have to follow up progress. It has been very operational driven, monthly review meetings, annual review meetings, and so on. It has to be much more flexible. You said the most difficult one is the hierarchy, the structure. So what advice do you give organizations on that? So this is interesting because that's where you get the bigger resistance. And often you get resistance from the people and employees and middle managers. Here you get resistance from the top, right? Because you're telling them, OK, you need to work differently. My advice is start small.

13:04Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:So don't go the next day and say, today we're not going to have any hierarchy in this company and there's no job descriptions. We'll figure out. No, what you want to do is take one of the most important transformation initiatives that you're doing and that team you empower fully. They can decide 90 % of the things. They can take decisions. They can move fast. They might check with one senior leader, the sponsor once in a while, but you leave them free though and they get priority on any of their requests. So you experiment with one only. and that will lead to good results and people will say oh what's going on there this is going fast and this is really nice so it will create like a snowball effect but don't try to remove hierarchy from one day to another because that's really chaos start small but show that this snowball effect can lead the rest of the organization towards that more project-based organization Okay, and the second bucket, leadership.

14:08How does leadership change, you know, from the CEO all the way down to the line manager?

14:14Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:That's, for me, the one that can have the bigger impact. From my experience talking to large organizations, senior leaders, somehow they prefer to spend most of their time, including the CEOs, on the things they already know. I call it their comfort zone. And their comfort zone for senior leaders is running the business, running the operations. Most of them came through the ranks through operations because they were very good at one piece of the operations, the finance, the operations itself, the sales. And they really feel very uncomfortable when they have to work in transformation initiatives because they need to really become leaders without hierarchies and contribute and share ideas and let other people take decisions.

15:00Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:For me, the leaders is where the biggest change can happen is how much of your week do you spend in change, projects and transformation? We did a research for the book and it was really 80 % of the senior leaders were spending less than half a day in transformation work. Four days and a half on day to day activities, operations. right and i would say at least half of your time if not more three days out of it you need to spend it in that zone where every day is different there's a lot of uncertain things you need quick decision making maybe you don't have clarity on the status but you need to keep pushing sometimes you need to stop the project for me that's the biggest piece on the leadership it includes prioritization.

15:49Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:That's the other big topic. You need to say no. You need to say these are the top three initiatives that we're going to invest these next six months. And unfortunately, leaders struggle with that as well. They want to do everything and hope one or two will succeed. People cannot cope with that. We need to be more strong on the priorities. I call it ruthless prioritization. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Another term you use is strategic fluidity, which sounds highly uncomfortable if you're a CEO or in the C-suite, because it's really difficult to communicate a vision to, you know, your employees and your shareholders if you are being flexible about your strategy based on the results that you're getting from these transformation projects.

16:37So how do you deal with that?

16:39Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:Yeah, so there's much more uncertainty and you need much more trust, right? So this is you're trusting the team, you're trusting that at the end of the day, that's where we will create the value. And I think this goes along what we just talked before, the speed of change. They were talking about big bets. You will not see immediate results in any project. It takes commitment to spend at least six months to start seeing some values. And you see that from very successful companies where they focus more on the long term. I think Amazon is one great example. They were looking at the long term. This is where we want to go.

17:16Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:We want to be the best on that piece. We want to build this transformation capacity so that we can adapt. So we're measuring performance differently. And this is where boards, shareholders, they need to be more patient. They need to trust that if the elements are in place, we're going to be successful.

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18:14On the prioritization piece, what recommendations do you give about how senior leaders first decide what projects to start because you want them to be focused and targeted and not say yes to everything? And then secondly, decide when something needs a little bit more time or actually you should just cut your losses.

18:35Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:Yeah, and we had an article in HBR about this on stopping projects, but let me bring it very simple to the listener. I asked two questions to a board of directors or executives. How often do you launch new initiatives, new projects in your organization? They say, maybe we launch twice per month. And they're very proud because launching projects mean that you're taking risks, you're innovative. But then I ask, how often do you finish them or you close them? And they look to each other, say, maybe I think the last time we finished a project was six months ago. So if you launch more projects than you finish, you have a big problem because capacity is already at its full.

19:14Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:So knowing that before we launch a new initiative, we need to stop two or three to give space within the organization, that is already a big game changer, right? People will notice that first we finish what we start, or we stop it because it's possible that we wanted to invest in this technology, and six months later, there's something better, cheaper, and more performing. So this is really important. I always say that today I can go to any organization and we could cancel 80 % of the projects and nothing will happen. That's another exercise that you can go. Try to cancel 80 % of the projects.

19:52Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:And I use the purpose. The purpose is very important to prioritize. What's the purpose of our business? Because the goals might change, but your purpose should not change. So if you use your purpose to be the best on something, be recognized for something, that will help you to eliminate almost half of your projects and the new ones should be linked to that big focus, which is your purpose. And you're describing this very fluid world, very innovative world, and I understand your point about how employees will feel energized by that. But also, it's quite uncomfortable. There's value in doing something that you've done for a really long time well, as opposed to this new world where I'm assigned to one project and it might be successful, but if it's not, I'm going to move to another one.

20:40And when you've worked with companies on these kinds of changes, you know, how have you seen in terms of how the employees react and how do leaders bring them along to make sure that they are enjoying it?

20:52Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:I think you touch on one of the most critical pieces, and it has connotations on human resources, on the future of work, on the type of work that people will be doing. And I give you just a personal example, Alison. A very good friend was working in a big French bank, global bank. He was doing 25 years of the same. He was head of risk management for loans and mortgages. And at one point, the bank decided we don't need people here. I think we can do all this with IT and automation. So they called my friend, say, as from tomorrow, you and your team will be displaced. And he got into a big transformation projects across Europe.

21:32Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:and he called me and said, Antonio, I've never been working in projects full-time. Can you help me? I'm scared. I like the day-to-day. I was very good. And then I sent him, of course, the HBR handbook and he loved that. And just two months later, he told me, Antonio, can we talk? I said, yes, I love my new job. I'm meeting people from all over the place. They're all different. Every day is different. There are challenges. I'm using my brain. We're working in teams. So I would say the majority people, if you support them from transitioning from repetitive tasks to something that requires for them to use their skills and their knowledge and working in teams, human people, we love to work in teams when people trust us and we have a role to play.

22:23Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez:It just leads to a more meaningful job. But I'm afraid that some leaders will see this as a cost-cutting exercise. And that will put people in resistance, scare mood. And that should not be. I think the future of work based on projects can be really meaningful. And personal growth is huge. And it sounds like you're advocating for people to do this with internal talent rather than, you know, hiring gig workers or using consultants. You see the project driven organization is still providing full time employment to people. Yeah. And this is something that I highlight. And with some big corporates, we discussed this.