HBR On Strategy · Harvard Business Review

How to Push for Change in a Large Organization

·27 min·4 clips

The episode opens with a straightforward question: how does a large organization innovate without losing its shape? Maria Roche frames the case around the difficulties of digital transformation in a large bureaucratic organization. Innovation, she notes, is not only for startups. Big institutions can do it too. The harder part is figuring out how to organize that work so it survives in a setting that looks nothing like a startup. The case follows U.S. Air Force Major Victor Salsa-Lopez and the launch of a program meant to find ways AI could strengthen U.S. defense efforts. Roche explains that the classroom cold call is designed to push students through the trade-offs of innovation inside a large organization. The conversation treats this as an organizational problem as much as a technology one. Structure matters. Incentives matter. So do the people expected to use the tools. The discussion then moves to the specific problem of standards and coordination inside the Department of Defense. One standard can help, but standards can also multiply instead of simplify the work. That tension becomes part of the lesson itself. The episode also widens the lens to education. The goal is not just to deploy technology. It is to help people understand where it works, where it falls short, and where resources should go. The AI Accelerator is presented as part of that learning, along with the mission of integrating technology with the warfighter. The conversation links this work to a larger effort to make the organization better at using new tools. Major Salsa-Lopez’s own background gives the case more depth. He describes growing up in South Texas, studying astronautical engineering at the Air Force Academy, and starting out as a NASA intern working mostly on earth science. He then talks about moving into Georgia Tech, then into the AI Accelerator at MIT, and into research on artificial intelligence, human-machine teaming, and multisystems. His path reinforces the episode’s larger point: technical expertise and institutional change have to meet in a practical place. The conversation keeps returning to the idea that a large organization needs educated people as much as advanced systems. That makes the episode less about one technology and more about how adoption actually happens. The final stretch brings that lesson back to mission. The AI Accelerator’s purpose is described as fundamental research in service of something larger. The educational mission sits beside the technical one. Active duty members were embedded in a university setting as part of that effort, not just to earn credentials. The episode closes on the same strategic problem it began with: how to help a big, complicated organization adapt without pretending the process will be neat or easy. The answer is not a slogan. It is structure, education, judgment, and persistence.

As heard by us

A practical look at why change inside big organizations is harder than it sounds.

HBR on Strategy frames large-scale adoption of new technology as a matter of design, education, and patience rather than slogans. Maria Roche's case study of U.S.

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Learn how AI change moves through a big organization without pretending bureaucracy disappears.

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