After thousands of hours inside transformations — the ones that worked and the ones that quietly fell apart — my co-author and I kept noticing the same shape underneath very different stories. Change in organizations is genuinely complex, but the reasons it succeeds or fails are surprisingly few. We eventually wrote them down as a deliberately simple formula: Leadership × Approach × Resources = Impact.
The most important thing about that formula is the multiplication sign. It is not a checklist where you collect points. If any single factor is zero, the result is zero — no matter how strong the others are. A brilliant approach with no leadership commitment produces a polished plan that nobody follows. Committed leaders with no real resources produce exhaustion and cynicism. Resources poured in without an honest diagnosis of where they should go produce expensive motion and very little change.
Leadership, in our use of the word, is not seniority. It is the willingness of the people at the top to change first, visibly, and to keep showing up when the work gets uncomfortable. Approach is the methodology, tailored to the specific organization rather than copied from a case study. Resources are the time, attention, capability, and energy that turn intention into new behavior. Each is necessary; none is sufficient alone.
What I value about thinking in these terms is diagnostic clarity. When a transformation stalls, the formula gives you somewhere to look. Usually one factor has quietly gone to zero — most often leadership commitment, because it is the hardest and least delegable. Naming that honestly is uncomfortable, but it is far cheaper than another year of activity that changes nothing.
It is a multiplication, not an addition — if any factor is zero, the result is zero.
This article is the short version of the idea; the full argument, with stories and tools, became our book Changeonomics. If the formula resonates, read on and then run it against a change effort you know well. Ask which factor is strongest, which is weakest, and — the only question that really matters — which one you are personally responsible for raising above zero.
A final, practical use of the formula: treat it as a recurring diagnostic, not a one-time insight. Before a major milestone, ask the team to rate each factor honestly — Leadership, Approach, Resources — on a simple scale. The lowest score is almost always where the next intervention belongs, and naming it openly turns a vague sense of being stuck into a clear, shared piece of work. Most teams already know which factor is weak; the formula just gives them permission to say it out loud.
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