Oct 21, 2025

The Iconoclast's Playbook: Why Breaking Icons Matters More Than Ever

What if the key to competing in today’s unpredictable world isn’t bringing your organization in line with best practices, but breaking away from them entirely?

Iconoclasm—challenging and moving beyond outdated norms—has been the engine of progress throughout history. From Galileo refuting the understood structure of the cosmos to Steve Jobs redefining humanity’s relationship to digital technology, bold thinkers have reshaped industries by moving away from ideas like modernization and optimization, and toward reinvention.

For context, think about how quickly everything shifted just since Y2K. The iPhone. App stores. Storage. The cloud. Computing power. These innovations both forced and enabled seismic shifts in how enterprises engage consumers and compete for eyeballs and dollars. Customization, personalization, mobility, virtualization, and near-instant delivery are all new factors of competition driving product, service and experience design today. And fast.

A CEO of a global investment bank recently shared with me that their biggest threat doesn’t come from other large banks—it comes from smaller, faster-moving, usually digitally-native competitors hollowing them out by attacking their highest-value activities. They just struggle with reaction time at this speed.

Today, success (and even survival) can hinge on cultivating a proactive mindset—one that prioritizes relentless innovation and anticipates change before it unfolds. Don’t just react; lead. By demonstrating bold leadership and taking decisive action, organizations can position themselves to recognize shifts early and capitalize on opportunities as they emerge.

Beyond Surface Transformations

Expanding on the need for bold leadership, many large enterprises have fallen into what I call the trap of "painting old cars red." They focus on surface-level fixes—polishing the exterior with sleek digital experiences—while leaving systemic issues untouched beneath. Things may look and feel different, but what changed on the surface didn’t impact how things actually run. The result? Massive technology debt, disconnected systems, and layers of process, organizational, and cultural inefficiencies that again stifle agility and innovation. They fail to achieve sustainable adaptation in the face of rapid technological and commercial evolution.

Thriving in this environment demands leaders who can modernize legacy systems, overhaul processes, and foster cultures capable of constant reinvention that support commercial innovation. Reimagined digital experience and operations; one simply cannot exist without the other.

Enter Argano

After two decades helping companies adapt to Twenty-first Century commercial, technological and social trends, I recognized this critical gap in their “red car” approach: the market has over-indexed on the topical, pushing out new products, services and experiences designed for the digital, virtualized and mobile consumer—while neglecting to invest in the modernization of operational platforms to support this commercial innovation and drive sustainable, high-performance business operations. It was a top-down approach where real transformation occurs bottom-up.

So for me it stood to reason that enterprises undergoing new types of challenges would need a new type of change partner. We founded Argano to be a first-of-its-kind, global powerhouse of a consultancy specifically dedicated to this business challenge; close the gap between the digital experience platforms we all see and interact with as consumers and the digital operating platforms that power fulfillment. Turn the people, process and technology that run your company into the enabler of continuous innovation and adaptability, not the governor of them.

But an exclusive focus on digital operations won’t be enough to underwrite a fundamental shift in client impact for Argano. In a market oversaturated with legacy consulting partners, standing out meant reimagining how our business is built from the ground up also. Iconoclasm at Argano goes beyond simply questioning your status quo; it also requires questioning ours.

Breaking Three Icons

Our journey to build something truly different began with a direct and honest question: What’s broken in consulting and digital services today? Through deep analysis, we identified three pivotal areas where bold, iconoclastic thinking could turn stagnation into reinvention and winning for ourselves and our clients.

1. Delivering measurable results:

Standing out in a crowded field requires more than ambition; it demands results that are measurable and undeniable. At Argano, customer satisfaction defines our success. With Net Promoter Scores three times higher than the industry average, we relentlessly focus on delivering results that create lasting and quantifiable impact for our clients. We must measure value creation, publish those results, and be willing to stake our fees on our clients’ realization of benefit.

2. Building capability differently:

We have a unique method of growing Argano. By acquiring world-class companies, we create a dynamic network of expertise that amplifies value across our ecosystem. But traditional M&A playbooks often over-index on integration, prioritizing uniformity at the expense of individuality, and inadvertently eroding the unique qualities that made an acquired company successful in the first place. At Argano, we take a fundamentally different approach with our "Joiner Model," which preserves and enhances the distinctive strengths of the companies we bring into our ecosystem. By focusing on thoughtful, selective integration of capabilities, we avoid the pitfalls of over-standardization, ensuring that each acquired company’s contributions align seamlessly with the evolving needs of our clients. As our capabilities become broader, and our scale becomes larger, our impact doesn’t dilute the same way as our legacy competitors.

3. Building a transformative culture:

Culture serves as the foundation for everything we do. In fact, we designed the culture model of the company before we even finished the business model, to say nothing of the financial model. At Argano, we’ve reimagined the employee experience through programs and communities to inspire adaptability, collaboration, and quality. The goal is to commit to our clients and each other differently. And having achieved world-class employee participation and approval rating scores, we continue to believe our culture underpins the outcomes our clients need today while keeping Argano agile and moving forward in a constantly shifting landscape.

Together, these three pillars serve as our blueprint for breaking free from outdated norms in consulting and digital services, challenging entrenched assumptions, and driving meaningful, measurable progress that reshapes the industry.

The Iconoclast's Mindset

The future is relentless, especially in technology, where the pace of change rewrites the rules of competition daily. Breaking icons has become essential for organizations determined to lead in an era defined by constant disruption and rapid innovation.

As a private company, Argano thinks about creating long-term value, allowing us to focus on what truly matters, creating a fundamentally different large-scale partner designed for sustained innovation and impact. Our approach is simple yet profound: to deliver exceptional results while continuously evolving alongside our clients' needs.

This vision enables us to achieve what many believed impossible: combining boutique-level service quality and deep client relationships with the scale and breadth needed to drive huge impacts for clients. By challenging traditional assumptions about how services companies should operate, we've built a model that not only delivers consistent value but also fosters a culture of perpetual reinvention.

Organizations that embrace bold reinvention today, while staying anchored in delivering real value, will shape the landscape for decades to come—but this is just the beginning.

This year, my newsletter series will explore how iconoclastic thinking applies to the most pressing challenges enterprises face today. Together, we’ll dive into topics such as:

Digital Transformation & Strategic Innovation – How organizations can break free from outdated models and embrace agile, technology-driven strategies to stay competitive.
Leading Through Change: Culture & Agility – The role of leadership in fostering adaptability, maintaining engagement, and driving transformation in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Operational Excellence at Scale – Insights on balancing efficiency and innovation while scaling businesses without compromising quality or agility.
AI, Data, and the Future of Work – Exploring how emerging technologies can enhance decision-making, create intelligent organizations, and reshape the way businesses operate.
Future-Proofing Organizations – Preparing for uncertainty by developing flexible strategies that enable resilience, long-term growth, and sustained impact.

I have worked for decades in an industry that, in my view, increasingly fails to live up to the promise it makes to its clients – with both customer satisfaction and employee engagement scores middling at best.

But we at Argano have committed to building something different. Something of value. Something transformative. And not just for our shareholders; their day will certainly come. But for our clients and our people. If we get all that right, and face the future as iconoclasts, everyone stands to benefit.

I invite you to join me on this journey—together, let’s challenge conventional thinking, embrace reinvention, and build the future.

This is the first installment of "The Iconoclast's Playbook," a series exploring how leaders can challenge conventional wisdom to build truly transformative organizations. Join me each month as we examine different aspects of iconoclastic leadership in the digital age.

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