Simpler, Stronger, Faster, Fiercer: Three CEOs Are Telling You the Same Thing

Within the space of a few months, three new chief executives at three of the largest companies in the world sent out the same message. At BP, Meg O'Neill used her first note to staff to promise a company that is "simpler, stronger and more valuable." At HSBC, Georges Elhedery sat down with Bloomberg to talk about killing complexity at the bank. At Disney, The Wall Street Journal found Josh D'Amaro a hundred days into a mission to make the company faster and fiercer.

These are three different industries with three different problems, and the diagnosis is identical: our own complexity now stands between us and our value.

The details behind the slogans are worth a moment. O'Neill is the first outsider ever appointed directly into BP's top job, and she arrived after activist pressure had already pushed the company to write down more than $4 billion of businesses; she told staff that BP is navigating an environment of significant complexity. D'Amaro leads a company whose stock trades at roughly the price it did a decade ago, and he told The Wall Street Journal that the culture change he wants comes down to "speed and risk-taking." He has already collapsed Disney's marketing fiefs under a single chief marketing officer. Elhedery has roughly doubled HSBC's share price since taking over, in large part by stripping the bank back.

I hear the same thing from almost every leadership team I work with. The frustration is rarely about the strategy. It is about the drag: approvals that add nothing, meetings that decide nothing, work that exists to feed the process rather than the customer. These CEOs have said in public what most executives admit in private.

The question worth answering is why companies end up this way, and what leaders must do to reverse it.

Why do big companies become slow and complex?

Big companies become complex because they reward activity instead of outcomes, and people build careers on that reward.

Most people in a large organization sit a long way from the paying customer. When you cannot see the customer from your desk, your value needs another measure, and the measure becomes activity: the process you run, the reviews you convene, the approvals that route through you. Adding a checkpoint feels like contribution. Removing one feels like risk.

Then the loop closes. The people promoted under that measure go on to run teams, and they build what they know. Process begets process and layer begets layer until "the way things get done" is simply the accumulated career logic of everyone who succeeded there. Nobody designed the complexity. Everybody built it. I have written before about the two Nobel Prize ideas that explain why teams slow down; the economics and the incentives point the same way.

Georges Elhedery described the mechanism precisely in his Bloomberg interview. Complexity, he argues, behaves like entropy: it increases wherever focus is absent, and nobody designs it. His remedy at HSBC was structural and it started at the top. He chose activities to exit entirely, cut the group operating committee from more than 20 people to about 12, and took the bank from no single point of accountability for revenue to roughly 60 percent of it owned by one accountable executive.

The bill is enormous. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate that excess bureaucracy costs the United States more than $3 trillion a year in lost output, roughly 17 percent of GDP. That number is the sum of capable people doing work no customer would ever pay for.

Why AI makes this reckoning unavoidable

AI collapses the distance between intent and outcome, which makes low-value activity visible and, worse for its owners, optional. Work that once justified a team and a workflow can now be done directly. The honest question stops being "how do we run this process faster" and becomes "why does this process exist at all."

That is exactly why AI will be resisted hardest by the people whose standing depends on the processes it replaces. The tool and the threat are the same thing. Expect the resistance to arrive dressed as prudence: concerns about quality, risk, and governance. Some of those concerns will be genuine. Many will be self-preservation wearing a compliance badge.

Leaders who cannot tell the difference will spend millions on AI and change nothing, because the technology will be absorbed into the very processes it was meant to eliminate.

The advantage big companies are not using

A large company that learns to move fast holds an advantage no startup can match, because it already owns what startups spend a decade chasing.

Startups act quickly because they have nothing to protect: no legacy process, no entrenched layers, no career logic to offend. What they lack is scale, resources, and reach. Incumbents hold the scale and the resources and cannot move. The open quadrant, big and fast at once, belongs to the first established company in each industry that genuinely simplifies. That is a first-mover advantage most incumbents do not even see, because they treat their slowness as a fact of size rather than a set of choices.

The clock matters more than it used to. Equilar's research shows the median tenure of an S&P 500 chief executive fell from six years in 2013 to 4.8 years in 2022, a drop of 20 percent. The Conference Board found that 42 percent of S&P 500 CEO transitions in 2024 happened at companies whose shareholder returns sat in the bottom quartile, up from 30 percent in 2017. A new CEO has roughly the length of a presidential term to take a company from slow and complex to fast and simple. That is why simplification is now the opening promise rather than the fifth-year initiative.

And when a company will not correct itself, the correction arrives from outside. In late 2025, Verizon announced the largest layoff in its history, more than 13,000 people and roughly a fifth of its management ranks, in the name of simplifying how the company works. Microsoft cut 6,000 roles that spring explicitly to strip out management layers. Amazon cut 14,000 while saying it needed to be organized "more leanly, with fewer layers." And this week Stripe and Advent put a $53 billion bid on PayPal, a company that was worth close to $360 billion at its 2021 peak. If you do not simplify your company, the market will eventually send someone to do it for you, at a price you will not like.

What leaders must do about it

Leaders and managers must become ruthless about challenging how their own companies work, and they must build an environment where that challenge is rewarded rather than punished.

Elhedery did not flinch from the word when Bloomberg pressed him on his restructuring. He said he was "definitely ruthless about killing the complexity and the drag," and HSBC's doubled share price suggests the market approved. Ruthlessness of this kind is a form of respect: for the customer, for the shareholder, and for the colleagues whose work should matter.

1. The first move is personal. Examine the meetings you hold, the reviews you require, and the approvals that route through you, and ask which of them a customer would pay for. Kill the rest, publicly, so people can see that elimination is safe.
2. The second move is to reward elimination. Most companies celebrate the person who launches something and ignore the person who removes something. Make killing a low-value process a promotable act, measured and recognized like any other result. What gets rewarded gets repeated.
3. The third move is to protect the challengers. The person who asks "why do we do this at all" is doing the company a service, and the people the question threatens will usually make them pay for it. If leaders do not visibly protect that person, the question stops being asked, and the silence gets called alignment. This is the same failure that turns overdue change into "innovation" once a leader finally moves.
4. The fourth move is to name self-preservation when you see it. Every process has an owner, and every owner has a reason the process must stay. Some reasons are sound. The test is simple: does the argument protect the customer, or does it protect the position?

This is the work I do with leadership teams at their offsites: aligning a team's ways of working with its ambition, which in practice means healthy challenge, faster decisions, and the deliberate removal of whatever adds no value. Teams rarely lack the intelligence for this work. They lack permission, and permission is a leader's gift to give.

So here is the question to take into Monday. What is one activity in your organization that exists to serve the process rather than the customer, and who would you have to protect if they killed it this quarter?

Frequently asked questions

Why do large companies become bureaucratic?

Because value drifts from outcomes to activity. Most employees sit far from the paying customer, so contribution gets measured in process, and the people promoted on that measure entrench it in their own teams. The complexity is nobody's design and everybody's construction.

How do I reduce complexity without cutting muscle?

Anchor every cut to the customer. Ask what the customer is paying for, trace the shortest path to delivering it, and require anything off that path to justify itself. Companies get this wrong when they cut headcount evenly instead of cutting the work itself, which removes muscle and leaves the drag intact.

Will AI reduce bureaucracy or entrench it?

That depends entirely on leadership. AI makes low-value work visible and optional, but if the owners of existing processes control its adoption, it will be absorbed into those processes and add a layer instead of removing one. AI eliminates drag only where leaders are willing to eliminate the process, and sometimes the role, that the drag supported.

Why do new CEOs make simplification their first promise?

Because their runway is short and the market is impatient. Median S&P 500 CEO tenure has fallen to under five years, and boards increasingly change leaders when shareholder returns lag. A new chief executive who intends to change how the company works has to start immediately and say so loudly.

Sources

Malcolm Moore, "BP should be 'simpler, stronger and more valuable', new CEO tells staff," Financial Times.

"Inside HSBC's AI-Fueled Overhaul," interview with Georges Elhedery, Bloomberg, March 2026.

Ben Fritz, "Josh D'Amaro Is 100 Days Into His Mission to Make Disney Faster and Fiercer," The Wall Street Journal, June 2026.