Seventy percent of enterprise-wide transformations fail. Not a few. Not the poorly planned ones. Seventy percent, across industries, across company sizes, across leadership teams that believed they were doing it right. Jackie Phichith spent 19 years inside those organizations. She watched it happen over and over. And the pattern was always the same: the moment pressure hit, the first thing to get cut was the one thing that determined whether the transformation would stick.
In a recent episode of Outside the Corporate Box, Jackie, a former change management leader at McDonald’s, Merck, and Pfizer, keynote speaker, and founder of Inspiration Your Way, sat down to talk about what she saw inside those walls, why most leaders still get it wrong, and what it actually felt like to do to herself what she had spent two decades advising others to do.
Episode video coming soon. Listen to the full episode on Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major audio platforms.
"When I'm 80 years old, will I look back at my decisions and feel proud?
Or will I feel like I could have done more, stepped out, helped more people?"
— Jackie Phichith
The Decision That Took 19 Years to Build
Jackie did not leave corporate in a single dramatic moment. She describes it as a slow burn that started about a year before she finally made the move, a gradual accumulation of the same question: is this still the right place for the work I need to do?
What pushed her over the edge was not dissatisfaction. It was scope. Inside the walls of any one organization, she could help that organization. Outside, she could help any of them. She wanted the broader stage. She wanted to reach the leaders who were making the decisions that affected thousands of people, and she could not do that from inside a single company.
This was her second exit. And she is clear: the second one was harder. The first time she stepped out, she had the energy of something new. This time, she was rebuilding with the memory of what had not worked before. Old fears resurfaced. Scope creep. Diluted focus. The identity shift from professional with a title to founder of one. She went from a salary to no salary, and she is direct about why that matters: it is one of the biggest reasons people do not step out of the corporate box, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.
Why Organizations Keep Getting Change Wrong
Here is the data point that shapes everything Jackie does. A survey asked employees how qualified they felt their leadership was to help them through a major transformation. Most people assume the number would be low. It was 27%. Nearly three out of four employees do not trust that their leaders are equipped to guide them through change.
That alone would be a problem. Add the Harvard Business Review finding that 70% of enterprise-wide transformations fail, and the picture gets sharper. Now factor in the fact that when pressure hits and costs need to be cut, the first thing organizations eliminate is training and professional development: the exact investment that would improve the odds.
Jackie’s argument is straightforward. An organization is a construct of people working toward a unified mission. Cut the support for your people during a transformation and you have statistically stacked the odds against yourself. Change is not a systems problem. It is a human problem.
She references Teddy Roosevelt’s approach as president of the New York City Police Commission, when he disguised himself and walked the city at midnight to see what was actually happening on the ground. Not what was being reported up the chain. What was real. Her point: most executive leaders are making transformation decisions on watered-down information and calling it strategy.
"If something doesn't work, you shouldn't be making a story around it.
Don't try to run a campaign.
People see right through that.
You've got to have honesty and transparency."
— Jackie Phichith
The SHINE Framework
Jackie developed a framework called Remember to SHINE for helping individuals and teams move through change. Each letter is a step in the process, and the order matters.
S: See it. People become paralyzed by fear when they do not understand what is happening. The first job of a leader is to give people the full picture, not just the announcement. Awareness strips fear of its control. When someone understands what is actually changing and why, their nervous system can start to regulate. Skip this step and you will hear people saying they feel behind, not good enough, or anxious about what they do not know.
H: Honor the shift. Leaders often try to push people into confidence before they have finished processing the transition. That does not work. Identity shifts are emotional. People need space to grieve the old version and begin to visualize the new one. Jackie uses a sports metaphor here: before the team can win, the coach helps them feel what it would be like to cross the finish line. You are building a new identity through the imagination, not through force.
I: Initiate action. Readiness is not a feeling you wait for. It is created by momentum. A single conversation, a single uncomfortable step, a single decision to move before you feel fully prepared, that is what starts to build the confidence you thought you needed first. The agency lives within you, not in waiting for conditions to be right.
N: Navigate together. You were never meant to change alone. Most people sit in meetings pretending they are fine while everyone else is doing the same thing. When a team builds enough trust to put what they are actually feeling on the table, they move faster. The bond formed through honest shared uncertainty is stronger than the one formed through performed confidence.
E: Elevate. When you stop experiencing change as something done to you and start growing through it, the team dynamic shifts. You build stronger bonds. You solve problems together differently. This is where transformation actually sticks.
The Founder Parallel
Jackie is quick to point out that the SHINE framework applies to founders too, not just corporate teams. She used it on herself. The same identity disorientation that hits an employee when their leader changes is the same thing that hits a founder when the adrenaline of launching wears off and the reality of what still needs to be built sets in.
Her practical advice for founders: treat your own business with the same operational structure you would expect from a company. Set quarterly goals. Do quarterly business reviews, just for yourself. Make deadlines and keep them. Build your core mission statement first and use it as the filter for every request that comes in, because scope creep is the most common way a solo founder loses momentum.
Her most important warning: when you are a founder of one, you are fighting your own internal dialogue with no team to provide balance. The more you can get the strategy out of your head and onto paper, with dates and milestones attached, the less power that internal noise has over you.
If You’re Navigating Your Own Change
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- Name what you are feeling. Fear does not lose its grip until you can see it clearly. Awareness strips fear of its control.
- Give yourself permission to honor the shift. The grief is real. So is the new identity on the other side of it.
- Take one uncomfortable move before you feel ready. Momentum is built from action, not from preparation.
- Build your mission statement and use it as a filter. Every request, every opportunity, every distraction gets checked against it.
- Run a quarterly business review on yourself. Goals, milestones, deadlines. Treat your own business like the serious operation it is.
The organizations and founders that will thrive through the next wave of change are the ones who stop treating the human side of transformation as a soft consideration and start treating it as the primary variable. Jackie Phichith has the data to prove it and the framework to fix it. The only question is whether you will act on it before the 70% catches up to you.
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