Quick change? That only works in a microwave.

Consultants flew in from overseas.

Slick slides.

A big vision.

A one-year plan and voilà! Operational excellence.

Sounds impressive, right?

But then I looked around.

My people were barely keeping up with the day-to-day.

Line breakdowns.

Customers pushing hard on the phone.

Marketing pushing discounts.

Sales making promises we couldn’t deliver on.

And in the middle of all that?

Learn a whole new system?

Change the entire workflow?

Achieve excellence?

I told myself:

“They saw the plan.

I see the people.”

And I really saw them.

Running from meeting to email,

Exhausted. Confused. Stressed.

Going through the motions of change just trying to survive the day.

So I did something no management book teaches.

I opened the contract.

I scaled back the consulting.

And I extended the timeline by a year and a half.

Yes, a year and a half.

Because real change doesn’t happen under pressure.

There are no magic tricks.

You can’t buy it in a deck of slides.

Real change happens

when the pace matches the heartbeat of your organization.

Ever tried to push a change too fast

and the system just spit it back out?