Corporate Stockholm Syndrome

“Enterprises have learned to live with IT projects that miss budgets and schedules, silos that block cooperation, and strategy that gets lost in translation. Vihervuori and Kontra ask whether this has to be inevitable. Their Organizational Brain offers a sharp, practical alternative, and the journey there is familiar, funny, and genuinely thought-provoking at the same time. A must-read for corporate leaders!”

“You had me at ‘1 in 200.’ That is the success rate the authors cite for IT projects, a disturbing number most of us have lived through more than once. They call it an organizational hostage situation, and the label fits. This witty, sharply analytical book is driven by a worried optimism: an honest look at who we are as organizations, and how we can break free from silos and conflicting agendas. It belongs on the reading list of the entire leadership team. IT is no longer a department. It is part of everyone’s job, and so is fixing it.”

“AI has changed the rules: companies can now process, analyse and generate information at a scale no human organisation can match. When company DNA, operating models and legacy systems remain unchanged, we may simply become much better at producing the wrong things faster. Corporate Stockholm Syndrome is essential reading for understanding this new reality and how to come out as a winner, not a bystander. The transformation will be uncomfortable. Standing still will be worse.”

“The great risk is that we use AI to build faster horses for organisations that need an entirely different way of knowing and running themselves. Corporate Stockholm Syndrome brilliantly diagnoses why large organisations become hostages to their own structures—and, more importantly, shows how AI can help set them free without surrendering human judgment.”

“In large enterprises, major transformations fail with remarkable consistency, and we keep blaming the wrong things. Kontra and Vihervuori show the problem is structural: silver bullets, reorganizations and better people won’t fix it; changing how the company describes itself will. Essential reading before launching your next transformation.”

“Most strategies die in PowerPoint, until IT builds something nobody actually asked for. Vihervuori and Kontra refuse to accept this as normal. Write strategy as a versioned, owned spec, then let people and AI compute from it. No tool to buy, no transformation program to launch. Start small, start now. Required reading for anyone who owns strategy execution.”

“With great clarity Vihervuori and Kontra make it visible how large transformation projects fail because of the corporate fragmentation. If processes, data and ways of working don’t change, AI will just amplify the problems. The book offers a compelling alternative where AI is a part of a real solution. It’s a must read for every leader involved in large transformation programs.”

“Any board member or leader without an engineering background will chuckle at the many relevant examples and quotes from bureaucrats struggling with the IT-department. But the stories have a mission, and that is to emphasize the importance of collecting and standardizing data so that it is as useful as possible in the AI-era. The book is a must read for decision makers.”