The Growth Playbook for Stagnant Industrial Businesses
By Nashay Naeve, Global Business Leader & Manufacturing Executive
Photo by Sonny Vermeer
The first time I walked into a plant I had been brought in to turn around, it was quiet. Not the productive quiet of a floor running well, but the watchful kind, where people were measuring how I showed up before deciding whether to tell me what was actually broken. I had seen that silence before. It is one of the most reliable early signals that an industrial business transformation is already overdue.
Most stagnant industrial operations don’t collapse. They drift. Revenue flattens. A process that should have been updated three years ago gets patched again. A high performer leaves and the gap never quite closes. None of it registers as a crisis. But together, it defines a trajectory. By the time the trajectory is undeniable, the organization has lost years it could have recovered.
Bain & Company’s 2024 research found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. That number is uncomfortable. It is also instructive because what separates the 12% that succeed is not better technology or bigger budgets. It is how early and honestly the diagnosis starts.
Three things determine whether an industrial turnaround works:
- The accuracy of the initial diagnosis
- The speed at which decisions get made once the diagnosis is clear
- And whether regional leaders are given real authority to execute not just accountability for outcomes.
Each of these is within a leader’s control. Most organizations get at least one of them wrong.
Get Off the Spreadsheet First
The most consistent mistake I see in industrial turnarounds is building the diagnosis from financial reports. Reports show outcomes. They don’t show causes and in a stagnant operation, the causes are almost never where the previous leadership said they were.
I’ve watched organizations call it a market problem when it is an execution problem. A talent problem when it is a culture problem. A cost problem when it is actually a growth problem that eroded the margin base over time. The language of the diagnosis shapes every decision that follows. Get it wrong and the work compounds in the wrong direction.
The floor shows what the reports hide: whether a team lead surfaces a problem early or waits until it becomes a crisis; whether the gap between documented standard work and actual practice is inches or miles; whether scrap rates and cycle times reflect a stable operation or one held together by workarounds nobody has written down.
The goal of early diagnostic work is not to identify what is broken. It is to understand what the organization has been trained to hide. Every stagnant operation has problems known internally that have never reached leadership because at some point, surfacing bad news carried a cost. Finding those problems, and making it safe to talk about them, is where the real work begins.
Touch These Three Things Before Anything Else
Once the diagnostic work is done, the sequence matters. I come back to three areas consistently, in this order.
People and trust
It’s not the org chart, not the headcount plan, but the actual question of who is telling me the truth and who isn’t, and why. I use information delay as a diagnostic tool. When I’m consistently the last to know about a quality issue or a missed target, that is not a communication failure. It is a trust failure. Somewhere in the history of the organization, people learned that delivering bad news carries a cost. The fix is not a new reporting structure. It is showing up the same way every time to make it clear that the response to bad news is problem-solving, not blame. That credibility builds slowly and disappears fast.
The real P&L
Not the reported numbers, but it’s the drivers behind them. Stagnant businesses tend to have financials that are technically accurate and operationally opaque. Revenue and margin are tracked. The levers that actually move them are not mapped precisely enough to act on. A raw material cost spike means something different if you have pricing leverage than if you don’t. A headcount reduction lands differently depending on where productivity actually lives in the operation. Rebuilding an honest picture of what drives the P&L is the foundation for every decision that follows.
The real growth constraint
This is almost never the one the previous leadership named. I pressure-test it with a simple question: what would have to be true for this business to grow ten percent next year? Which of those things are actually within our control? Where has the team stopped asking that question because the answer became uncomfortable? The gap between the official story and the honest answers to those questions is where the turnaround work actually lives.
Stop Planning. Start Running Experiments.
The two-year implementation plan is one of the most reliable ways to ensure a stagnant operation stays stagnant.
I understand the instinct behind it. Transforming an industrial business is complex, the stakes are real, and nobody wants to be wrong at scale. So the organization spends months building a plan that accounts for every variable before any major change is made. By the time it deploys, the underlying conditions have shifted, key people have left, and the team has spent two years calibrating its ambitions to the pace of documentation rather than execution.
The principle I run on instead: pilot and scale, don’t plan and fear. Run small experiments. Fail in months instead of years. Decide quickly what to keep. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to learn faster than the competition in the face of it.
The companion principle matters just as much: no decision is a decision. I constantly see leaders avoid choosing because they’re worried about being wrong. But inaction is itself a strategic choice, and in a deteriorating operation, usually the most expensive one. Competitors who move faster define the standard. The organization waiting for certainty spends years catching up to decisions it should have made.
Give Regional Leaders Real Authority, Not Just Accountability
When a stagnant operation spans multiple geographies, one failure mode becomes especially common: headquarters writes the transformation strategy, the regional plants receive it, and with varying degrees of visibility to leadership, they adapt it, delay it, or quietly work around it. A strategy written in one context rarely accounts for the specifics of another.
What I’ve learned running operations across geographies is that consistency of standards matters far more than uniformity of approach. The same commitment to quality, the same expectation that problems surface early, the same accountability for outcomes. Those are the ones that have to be held everywhere. How they’re operationalized, the communication norms, the decision-making cadence, the way feedback moves through the operation. Those are ones that have to flex for the context.
The mitigation is giving regional leaders real authority and not just responsibility for headcount numbers, but genuine decision-making power over how they develop their teams, how they respond to local conditions, and how they advocate internally for the resources they need. When that authority sits only at the top, the strategy looks right on paper but underdelivers everywhere it lands.
The Quiet Operations Are the Ones to Watch
Industrial turnarounds almost never look like rescues. They look like a compounding series of smaller moves: a diagnosis that surfaces the real constraint, a trust-building signal that changes what people are willing to say, a decision made in weeks instead of quarters, a regional leader given real authority who uses it. None of these is a transformation event. Together, they change the trajectory.
“Ahead of plan” rarely means the plan was right. It usually means the team got good at moving fast enough to learn before the plan needed to be right. The operations that sustain growth are not the ones that execute a strategy flawlessly. They’re the ones that built the capacity to adapt.
Don’t watch the operations that are already in crisis. Pay attention to the quiet ones, the flat revenue, the retained customers, where nothing obviously wrong. Take care of the ones where urgency is easiest to defer, and where the cost of deferring it compounds the longest before anyone notices.
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Nashay Naeve is a global business leader and general manager in the industrial and manufacturing space, with experience leading growth and transformation across operations in the US and Europe.
Follow her on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nashay
