What does it take to stay agile and compete effectively in today’s business world? Smart leaders are entirely reorienting their organizations around project-based work, says Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, CEO of Projects & Company. This requires learning how to better prioritize, fund, and staff these initiatives; measure and incentivize success; and quickly end projects that aren’t working so resources can be diverted to ones that are. He explains why executives must radically rethink how they and others spend time, how work gets done, and the eventual pay-off of this kind of reorg. Nieto-Rodriguez wrote the book Powered by Projects and the HBR article “The Project Driven Organization.”
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So we talk about that a lot, we need to be more nimble, but how do you actually do that?
ALISON BEARD: 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.
ADI IGNATIUS: So that sounds really positive and sounds different from the traditional model of maintaining and growing operations, managing talent. It also sounds really hard.
ALISON BEARD: 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 & 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.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ:
Thank you for inviting me.
ALISON BEARD: 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?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Alison, I’m sure you’ve experienced this 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, 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 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.
ALISON BEARD: Is that lack of senior leadership, understanding, involvement, really organizing the company around projects, is the fact that it’s not yet that way the reason most projects still fail?
ANTONIO 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.
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 across department, across the world, and they don’t do that enough. So that’s the two big areas where the leaders should be playing a more active role.
ALISON BEARD: If an organization wants to move from a operational mindset to one that is much more project-oriented, what is the first step?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: 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 failure, 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. 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.
ALISON BEARD: For companies that have already moved to a very traditional organizational structure to something like Agile, how is this the next step? How is this an evolution from that?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Well, I think Agile has been great and Agile has been there for 20 years and 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. They work in smaller teams, not huge teams, and they also work on iterations, 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 transformation, constant transformation. For that, you need something bigger.
And that’s where I came with the concept of project-driven, where 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.
This is just bringing a different way of working, a different organization type to embrace what I call the transformation edge. We are living in a world of change and that will not go backwards, unfortunately. Where in the past, operations was 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.
ALISON BEARD: And it might be obvious, but the driver of this is the rapid pace of technological change.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: The rapid pace of change, the rapid pace of new technology, the rapid pace of new disruptions, 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, not operations.
We should not be doing operational task 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.
ALISON BEARD: 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.
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: Absolutely. So that’s a core message. 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 redeployed. 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, upskilling. And the companies that I talk about in the book, that’s what they did. One of them, Haier, 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 when they’re working on something that has impact, where they’re empowered to take decisions. They might benefit from the returns. So I think that’s for me the really positive side, but the change and the jump is huge.
ALISON BEARD: Let’s dig into what companies need to do to move to this more project-driven model. You 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?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: So there’s three aspects I cover here. It’s the culture. We talked about 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 with giving their power away.
So the structure is the worst thing that can happen if you want to lead projects transversely because it slows you down. The last piece on that bucket is governance. Governance is the big meetings that leaders have to follow up progress. It has been very operationally-driven, monthly review meetings, annual review meetings, and so on. It has to be much more flexible.
ALISON BEARD: You said the most difficult one is the hierarchy, the structure. So what advice do you give organizations on that?
ANTONIO NIETO-RODRIGUEZ: 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 because you’re telling them, “Okay, you need to work differently.” My advice is start small. 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 make decisions, they can move fast. They might check with one senior leader, the sponsor once in a while, but you leave them freedom 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