The Change Maker’s Playbook

How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company

This book began as an investigation into a pattern I kept seeing from the inside—across initiatives, with real leaders trying to make them work.

As one of the world’s first corporate Chief Innovation Officers at Citi, I was watching technically sound initiatives stall—not because the ideas were wrong, but because organizations weren't built to absorb them. This wasn’t abstract observation. It was happening in efforts that were actively being built, tested, and scaled. Across sectors and company sizes, the obstacles were consistent.

The problem wasn’t strategy or technology. It was the gap between what was technically possible and what organizations could actually absorb and act on.

I wrote the book to make that pattern visible—and to understand why some organizations moved through it while others didn't.

The book structures what I was seeing into three phases: Seek, Seed, and Scale:

Seeking

Uncovering where the real disconnects between possibility and adoption live

Seeding

Building and testing approaches that bridge them

Scaling

And executing through the complexity that comes with anything genuinely new

This wasn't a prescribed methodology so much as a way of organizing what I was observing across organizations—what the ones that moved forward had in common—and where the ones that stalled broke down. Each phase is illustrated through real examples of leaders working through these challenges.

The challenge I was writing about in 2018 has intensified, not changed.

AI has raised the stakes on every capability gap the book identified. The distance between what's technically possible and what organizations can absorb has widened. And the organizational conditions required to close that gap—mindsets, operating design, and the ability to build alignment across functions that don't share language or incentives—are still the determining factor in whether transformation creates value or becomes expensive shelfware.

The patterns held. The urgency is higher.

This was the starting point. The work has evolved.