Where there are people, there’s politics. Where there’s change, people resist. When speaking to CIOs, transformation leaders, and management consultants, one issue consistently surfaces: Organizational politics is a major obstacle to enterprise transformations. More than 80% of decision-makers in Forrester’s Q2 2025 Tech Pulse Survey agree, yet organizational politics is rarely discussed openly or addressed directly in management literature.

One reason is that politics often gets a bad reputation as “management with illegitimate means.” In government, we complain about backroom deals, horse-trading, factions, and carefully choreographed alignment, but seasoned politicians understand certain facts that transformation leaders easily forget.

Reforms Create Winners And Losers

Politicians know that reform redistributes something: money, influence, status, or opportunity. Enterprise transformation does the same. Changing an operating model redistributes decision rights. AI changes the value of expertise.…