New WOW at Equitable · Prep

The Professor's Questions

Why did Pearson feel the need to roll out NWOW to begin with?
Reviewing the B case – which is an interactive NWOW playbook what do think are its strengths? Its weaknesses? Why?
The firm claims it has achieved significant performance improvements. Which elements of the NWOW approach contribute most to the enhanced results? Why?
Do you think NWOW would have succeeded had COVID not happened when it did? If yes, why? If no, why not?
Should Pearson and Hurd continue to push for 100 percent adoption of NWOW in the firm? If yes, why? IF no, why not?
What do you recommend Pearson and Hurd do with the pockets of resistance? Should they leave them be? Should they pull adoption and acceptance through metrics and oversight?
Going ahead, does it make sense for Equitable to only recruit leaders who will embrace NWOW and the firm’s operating model? Is it a viable approach? Or, will the firm miss out on talent by using such a stringent condition?

My Answers

Q1. Why roll out NWOW

Pearson rolled out NWOW because the IPO gave Equitable a new scoreboard and an old metabolism. The scoreboard was quarterly, public, and unforgiving. The metabolism was still a mutual-company subsidiary's: two accounting cycles a year, a 50-day close, a $200 million error threshold, a 61% not-in-good-order rate on enrollment forms, and 1,500 registrars in group insurance. He did not need a new product idea. He needed the firm to move at the speed the new owners would measure.

Three pressures stacked on top of that.

The house was new; the habits were not. After the 2018 IPO ($2.8 billion raised), Pearson said they wanted to "move out of AXA mother's house" and build their own. Five years of preparing the spin, the IPO, and the rebrand had exhausted people. The internal line was: the old ways worked, why change. Raju's diagnosis: no urgency, no sense of disruption, strategy aimed at policies not revenue. The board approved the 2020 targets and then asked the only question that mattered: do you have the culture to hit them?
The industry was slow in a market that was not. U.S. life insurers grew earnings at 2.7% a year against 5.5% for the S&P 500. Their NPS was 4.5 against USAA's 77. Life insurance ownership among U.S. adults fell from 63% in 2011 to 52% in 2023. Meanwhile 10,000 Americans were turning 65 every day (Pearson later says 11,000), the retirement income gap was on a path from $28 trillion in 2015 to $137 trillion in 2050, and 67% of retirees worried their money would not last. Equitable's largest unit already threw off $1 billion of cash a year, with the market peaking around 2030 at 90 million people. A slow firm in a shrinking-window market is a strategy problem, not an HR problem.
Talent would not come for the old story. By 2025 millennials would be 50% of the workforce; 4% were interested in working for a U.S. life insurer. Pearson had seen in Asia that scarce resources force innovation. In New York, abundance had produced the opposite.

What he copied was not a slogan. He read Doerr on OKRs, sat in a Stanford d.school studio, studied Spark, ING, and USAA. The 61% NIGO rate is the tell: ordinary process improvement asks how to cut the ratio; design thinking asks how to get to zero returns. NWOW was the operating system that would let a newly public firm publish targets and actually hit them — faster, cheaper, with the people closest to the work allowed to decide. The five pillars (OKRs, adaptive leadership, design thinking, enterprise agile, dynamic enablers) are just the kit. The need was: we cannot run a NYSE company on a twice-a-year close.

Q2. Playbook strengths and weaknesses

The playbook is unusually honest about why, unusually clear about who does what, and unusually heavy on when we meet. Its strengths are the spine. Its weaknesses are that the spine got buried under a calendar.

Strengths

It starts with a burning platform and a burning aspiration, signed by the CEO. Pearson's letter puts 10,000 Americans turning 65 each day and a retirement gap compounding by trillions next to "we need people who love to come to work." Menard's note says one-third of the firm is already on NWOW as of early 2021, and the playbook itself is an MVP. Most corporate agile decks skip the why. This one does not.
It is a kit, not a law — at least on page 4. "Not a how-to. Building blocks you hand-pick for the Mission." That sentence is the best sentence in the document. It is also the sentence the rest of the document keeps violating.
It names five questions, not five slogans. How do we aim teams at the biggest aspirations? How do the people closest to the work get to decide? How do we make a place that grows skill and autonomy? How do we prototype what customers want rather than what we assume? How do we unleash teams? Adaptive leadership, design thinking, enterprise agile, OKRs, and dynamic enablers are answers to those questions.
It distinguishes Squads from Self-Managing Teams, Tribes from CoEs from Delivery Units. Cross-functional 6–10 for end-to-end product work; same-function 6–15 for sales desks and wholesalers; Tribes of 70–150 with a Tribe Lead; CoEs of 30–100; Delivery Units of 100–1,000 running repeatable client-facing work. The architecture admits that a call center is not a feature team. The role cards then do something rare: they list I do not — do not micromanage, do not play the boss, do not skip the ceremonies, do not assume you must have the answers.
It separates moonshots from commitments. Hit 70% of a moonshot (onboard 200k educators; NPS of 50) and it counts as success. Hit 100% of a commitment (50–60% capital payout; 40% diversity in leadership). That single distinction keeps OKRs from becoming a second budget.
It measures four things, not one. Maturity, efficiency (lead time, velocity, defects), culture (eNPS), and business impact (NPS, net flows, first-year premium). A playbook that only tracks story points would have been a ritual. This one at least aims the instruments at the P&L.

Weaknesses

Page 4 says kit; pages 40–48 issue a timetable. Daily 15-minute stand-up, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint review, retro, PO sync every sprint, monthly macro-unit review, quarterly Big Room Planning, QBR. Schirripa's wholesalers were right: this is a heavy cadence. The playbook never writes a page titled "when not to run this ceremony." That missing page is why ops and distribution later called it a time sink.
The Delivery Unit — the archetype that matches call centers, advisors, and branch work — had not been mobilized by February 2021. The playbook says so in plain language. The later resistance in Chandler's and Fafian's shops is not a surprise. The kit was designed, then left empty, in the exact places the A case later struggles.
Being is declared more important than Doing, then given two slides. The iceberg drawing (mindset under the waterline; stand-ups and trackers above) is the right picture. The next 30 pages are agendas, Betterworks, Azure DevOps, Thrive, Yammer. A new hire will learn the calendar before they learn "from analyze-and-perfect to act-and-iterate."
It still smells like the consultants they later fired. Tribes, Squads, Chapters, CoEs is the Spotify model as McKinsey packaged it. Pearson was right to burn the boats. The vocabulary stayed. A 25-year claims processor hearing that her Tribe Lead is "the start-up founder" will not feel seen.
"Interactive PowerPoint, click around" is a 2021 format, not a living system. Ownership of updates is unnamed. By 2025 the firm has 36 months of scars the playbook does not contain: 130-touchpoint collections, seven systems timing out on one screen, wholesalers who will share upstream information but will not sit in a daily stand-up. A living playbook would have added a "regulated operations" chapter and a "field sales" chapter. This one froze in February 2021.
Co-location was a premise; remote was a patch. The A case says teams were assumed to sit in one room. The B case adds seven remote practices and a day-in-the-life of a PO. Useful. Still a patch. The original design did not contemplate the world that actually arrived.

Net: I would keep the first 20 pages and the role-card I do nots. I would cut the ceremony calendar down to a menu, and I would write the two missing chapters — Delivery Units and field distribution — before I used this document to push the last 20%.

Q3. Which NWOW elements drive results

The results are real, and they are not mainly from the stand-up. The pieces that moved numbers are: a named Mission with a team that does nothing else; the functions that used to hand off sitting in one squad; OKRs that made "3% growth" look like the wrong sport; and permission to ship an unfinished MVP. The ceremonies are how those pieces stay visible. They are not the engine.

I would rank them.

Dedicated teams against a Mission, not borrowed evenings. Scanlon gave Mitchell one month to turn 1,200 registrars into phone-and-online enrollment. She came back in two weeks. His line is the whole theory: "In the past I had to pull people off other work and have them do this in their spare time. Now this is the squad's mission. They are highly focused." Group Retirement then saw online service clicks +400%, 13,000 extra outbound calls, and $70 million of extra sales. Raju: "Double the speed and you can double the revenue." That is not a standup metric. That is what happens when the work stops being a side hustle.
Cross-functional squads that kill handoffs. In Individual Retirement, product, IT, and pricing used to live in silos. NWOW put them in one team. New products moved faster. The 10-person cap (Raju: above 10 you cannot move fast) is a constraint that forces the right people into the room and the wrong meetings out of it. Layers falling from 26 to 5 is the same idea at enterprise scale: fewer places for a decision to die.
Moonshot OKRs, not incremental targets. Scanlon had to stop hearing "your numbers are fine" and start hearing "you are here for exponential growth, not 3% or 10%." The playbook's 70%-equals-success rule matters: it makes a stretch target safe to declare. Without that, people sandbag. Design thinking's question on the 61% NIGO rate — how do we get to zero returns, not a better ratio — is the same muscle.
MVP as a cultural permission, not a software trick. They shipped an enrollment app with pieces still missing, collected advisor feedback, and built the missing panel. Scanlon: "We would never have launched an unfinished product before." COVID made that permission urgent. The method made it legal. That is design thinking earning its keep.
Ceremonies as the accountability layer, second. Daily stand-ups meant you could not hide. Scanlon: when you are in the work and being held to account, you cannot escape what you own, because there are so many rituals that update completion. Useful. But the wholesalers who refused the stand-up still created value once they shared upstream demand with the back office. The information flow mattered more than the 15 minutes.

What I would not credit first. The full ceremony calendar. The Spotify nouns. The dashboards. Those are how HQ sees the work. Chandler's eNPS going from 0.7 to 29.5 happened after she listened for months, ran a 90-day control group, and had IT extend a timeout so people stopped losing work across seven systems. That is adaptive leadership and a bottleneck removed — NWOW as a license to fix the work, not NWOW as a meeting.

On TSR. Since IPO, Equitable's TSR is 175.5% against core peers at 86.1% and the S&P 500 at 116% (Exhibit 5c, through 2024-12-31; 1-year 45% vs peers 24.7%). Raju is right that if culture change does not show up in TSR it does not count. I would still not draw a straight line from stand-ups to the stock. GAAP net income jumps around with derivative marks (2019 −$1.76B, 2022 +$2.07B). The cleaner story is operating: faster product, more calls, fewer layers, a workforce that will recommend the place (ops eNPS 29.5; TAP 33 vs firm 27). Those are NWOW. The multiple is also a decade of rates, AB, and the RILA book. Hold both.

Q4. Would NWOW have succeeded without COVID

Yes, it would have succeeded — as a slower, shallower, more political program. No, it would not have succeeded as the thing in the case: a 36-month march to 80%, with an unfinished app in market and a COO who had sat next to a clerk for an hour. COVID was not the idea. It was the deadline that made the idea expensive to refuse.

Why it would still have lived:

Pearson had already tied it to a public scoreboard. Quarterly reporting, 2020 targets on the whiteboard, a board that had asked about culture. That pressure does not need a virus.
He had already burned one boat in principle: IDO staffed internally, Menard (his former chief of staff) in charge, five-day boot camp that rips the Band-Aid off. Scanlon had already been tapped as the first line of business. The first tribe was going to run even in an office.
The 61% NIGO rate, the 1,500 registrars, the 50-day close — those bottlenecks were not created by COVID. A patient CEO who had rebuilt a balance sheet after 2008 would have kept pushing.

Why it would not have looked like this:

MVP permission arrived because the alternative was 20–40% less sales and 1,200 registrars who could not enroll anyone from home. Scanlon would not have launched an unfinished product "before." Without COVID there is no "before." Design thinking stays a workshop.
Co-location was a premise. Raju asked, do we pause. Hurd said accelerate. If the office had stayed open, NWOW would have been "the new meeting in the same room," easier to fake, easier to wait out. The field would have kept playing golf. The headquarters-versus-line gap Schirripa describes would have stayed comfortable.
They fired McKinsey because they could not wait. Pearson: once the people driving the culture change are not Equitable's, it dies. A non-crisis rollout keeps the consultants in the building longer. The playbook would have stayed theirs.
George Floyd and TAP used the same operating system in a second crisis. That chapter does not exist without 2020. The diversity pipeline (24 people, 54% promoted, eNPS 33 vs 27) is a COVID-era child.

The 2025 irony is the proof. Scanlon now hears: "Why bother, COVID is over, there is no burning crisis, we are doing fine." If the program needed a crisis to get to 80%, the last 20% will not move on nostalgia. That is why Q5 is not optional. A method that only works in a pandemic is a wartime habit, not an operating model. Pearson's job is to show that the Mission-and-squad logic still pays when people can go back to golf.

Q5. Push for 100% adoption?

No to 100% of the 2021 playbook. Yes to 100% of the operating principles. Pearson should not declare victory at 80%, and he should not force every wholesaler into a daily stand-up. He should make it impossible to opt out of four things: a Mission, OKRs, a team that owns the work end to end, and the customer's voice in the room. How they meet can vary by archetype.

Why not "leave it at 80%":

Scanlon is right about the social physics. If it is optional, it becomes a philosophy, then a preference, then a memory. Wealth management's "very high preference for the status quo" is the canary. Retirement throws off $1 billion of cash a year and peaks around 2030. A split firm — agile in Group Retirement, 1990s in wealth — will leak the next decade through the unconverted half.
Pearson already spent the sentence he cannot take back: "This is a culture change. This is not a test, not a pilot." Walking it back teaches the organization that the next transformation is also a test.
The 20% is not random. It sits in distribution, operations, and wealth — the market-facing and the regulated. Leaving them be is leaving the client-facing edge on the old OS.

Why not "100% of the ceremonies":

The playbook itself said pick building blocks. Delivery Units were never mobilized. Hurd watched a junior employee do an inefficient hour of work and concluded NWOW was not the most efficient way in that case. Fafian has 130 touchpoints and 25-year specialists who will not trust a toggle. Schirripa's wholesalers will give you upstream signal; they will not give you 15 minutes every morning. Forcing the calendar is how you turn a good OS into cargo-cult agile.
They already have the counter-example. Chandler got ops eNPS from 0.7 to 29.5 by listening, running a 90-day cell, and fixing a timeout — not by winning the stand-up argument. Scanlon: "I don't care what page 35 of Turn the Ship Around! says. I care about output."

What I would tell the room: 100% on Mission / OKRs / end-to-end ownership / customer in the loop. A menu of ceremonies by archetype — Squads run the full sprint set; SMTs and field sales run a weekly sync plus a monthly review; Delivery Units run Kanban, SLAs, and a weekly bottleneck review. Publish the menu so "we adapted" is not a euphemism for "we ignored." Pearson keeps saying it is not a pilot. Fine. The thing that is not a pilot is the OS, not the Tuesday agenda.

The cost: purists will say we blinked. Some of the 20% will hear "adapted" as permission to wait. That is why Q6 cannot be "leave them be." Adaptation is for the work. It is not a hiding place for the leader.

Q6. What to do with pockets of resistance

Do not leave them be. Do not only pull them through metrics. Sort the pocket before you treat it. There are three kinds of resistance in the case, and they need three different moves.

Kind 1 — the playbook does not fit the work. Ops (Chandler, Fafian), wholesalers (Schirripa), and the still-empty Delivery Unit. Treatment: rewrite the last mile with them in the room. Hurd already did the right diagnostic — sit for an hour and watch. Fafian's turning point was not a dashboard. It was new business growing exponentially, headcount not being enough, and the NWOW team arriving as people who "are here to hear our ideas and make our lives easier." Pull that through: map the seven systems that time out, extend the timeout, cut the 130 touchpoints, give the field a weekly demand signal instead of a daily stand-up. Then put two or three metrics on the wall that they already believe — cycle time, error rate, eNPS, first-year premium — not a maturity score from IDO. Oversight yes; HQ's scorecard as the only lever, no.

Kind 2 — the leader will not own it. Hurd's own question: "If they will not fully embrace it, are we willing to replace that leader?" For this kind, yes. A Tribe Lead who is an "un-enabler" (Pearson's word) taxes every squad under them. Scanlon's method is usable: two meetings to explain why, the third to say this is how we work. After that, it is a selection decision, not a change-management problem. Do it in the 20%, not as a purge of the 80%.

Kind 3 — people two or three years from retirement. Hurd already saw them leave. Let them. Do not spend coaching inventory on someone whose rational strategy is to wait you out. Offer a clean exit. Spend the seats on TAP-like people who want the new game (54% of that 24-person pipeline already promoted).

What I would not do. A single firm-wide adoption KPI that treats Wealth Management's status-quo preference the same as a claims team's timeout problem. That metric will be gamed, and it will poison Kind 1. I also would not hold a third offsite with another Marquet chapter. They are past inspiration. They are in the last mile, where Pearson's burning aspiration (11,000 people turning 65 each day, Social Security in deficit since 2016, a market that peaks in 2030) has to be translated into this week's bottleneck, not into another letter.

A practical 90-day pack:

Publish the archetype menu (Q5). Name which pocket is which kind.
For every Kind 1 pocket: one Hurd-style observation day, one bottleneck kill, one metric the team chose, one IDO coach who reports to the line leader, not the other way around.
For every Kind 2 leader: a decision in the quarter — in, or out. No third meeting.
Do not announce 100%. Announce: no team without a Mission and OKRs by quarter-end. That is the non-optional floor.

Q7. Only hire leaders who embrace NWOW?

Yes for leaders. No as a blanket filter on all talent. The operating model is the job description of anyone who sets a Mission, owns a budget, or coaches a squad. It is not the job description of the best actuary, the 25-year claims specialist, or the advisor who holds the client relationship. Use the role cards' I do not list as the leadership screen. Do not use "loves daily stand-ups" as the talent screen.

Why the leadership bar should be hard:

Hurd already framed the risk: a hire with ambition who is not 100% on NWOW may become an un-enabler. In a tribe model one such person is not a diversity of thought. They are a tax. Pearson flattened 26 layers to 5. The remaining five have more leverage, not less. A skeptic in a 26-layer stack could be waited out. A skeptic in a 5-layer stack runs a fifth of the firm.
They have evidence that selection works. Raju: one response to resistance was "this may no longer be the best organization for you." TAP built a pipeline instead of hoping the old one would convert (24 people, 54% promoted). Scanlon drafted under-used talent into the first squads the way a team uses a first-round pick. That is hiring for the OS.
The playbook is explicit. Tribe Lead, Area Lead, PO, Coach — every card says coach, do not micromanage, do not skip ceremonies, do not play the boss. If a candidate cannot sign that, they are applying for a job Equitable is trying to delete.

Why a firm-wide purity test will cost them people they need:

Dynamic enablers were supposed to be skills-first, not title-first. A skills-first firm that then filters for cultural enthusiasm in every specialist is contradicting itself. Fafian's 25-year operator is the person who knows which of the 130 touchpoints actually breaks a client. Chandler needed those people in the 90-day cell. The field wholesaler is, in Hurd's words, "the voice of the customer" even when they hate the ritual.
Life insurance is a shortage market on the talent side. 4% of millennials want in. Equitable cannot afford to add a second filter — "and also please love Agile nouns" — on scarce technical skill.
The 2021 playbook will itself keep changing. Hiring for "this version of NWOW" locks the firm to February 2021. Hiring for "you will run a Mission, publish OKRs, put the customer in the room, and not hoard decisions" stays true if the ceremonies move.

How I would write the rule. For Tribe Lead, Area Lead, PO, SMT Lead, Chapter Lead, NWOW Coach: must demonstrate they have run or will run the OS. A live case in the interview: here is a 130-touchpoint process and a wholesaler who refuses stand-ups — what do you keep, what do you drop, what do you measure. If they say "full playbook, no exceptions," they fail. If they say "my team, my rules," they fail. If they can separate principle from ritual, they pass. For specialists and producers: hire for craft and for not poisoning the OS. They do not have to love it. They do have to live with a Mission and a number.

The cost of the hard leadership bar: you will lose a rainmaker who wants a personal fief. Good. The cost of applying it to everyone: you will lose the person who can take NIGO from 61% toward zero because they have sat the process. Not acceptable.

Case Summary

Equitable is an American life insurer founded in 1859. Originally called The Equitable Life Assurance Society, it was already one of the largest life insurers in the US by the early 20th century, and still the fifth-largest in the early 1990s. In 1992, France's AXA committed to invest US$1 billion on condition that it demutualize and go public; the company did so, raised a further US$450 million, became AXA's main investment outside Europe, and was renamed AXA Equitable. In CFO Robin Raju's words, after going from a mutual to a subsidiary of a large overseas conglomerate, "the culture was relaxed and comfortable, but there was very little accountability." The books were closed twice a year, with a 50-day turnaround and a US$200 million error threshold. The group insurance business relied on 1,500 policy enrollers. Many products were still promoted by phone and in person.

In 2011, Mark Pearson was moved to New York from his post as CEO of AXA Japan. He was born and raised in Zimbabwe during its war of independence, couldn't afford university, went abroad at 17 to join the insurance industry, and drove growth in Hong Kong and Japan. America was a post-financial-crisis turnaround job: rebuild the balance sheet, stabilize earnings. He describes himself as having "the patience to get things done," not the type who tears everything down and then leaves. The industry itself is mature and low-growth, but society's need for retirement products is huge: people are living longer, employers are shifting retirement responsibility onto individuals, and people want a more active retirement.

In 2018, AXA spun off Equitable through an IPO, raising US$2.8 billion. The new company was Equitable Holdings, with Athena on a blue shield. Pearson became CEO. Five divisions: Individual Retirement, Group Retirement, Investment Management and Research, AllianceBernstein, and Protection Solutions. He later said: "How many people get to design everything from scratch — the brand, the core principles, the organizational structure, the key goals?" But at the time almost nobody wanted big changes. Five years of preparing for the spin-off, the IPO and the rebrand had left employees exhausted. Chief Innovation and Design Officer Hillary Menard: "We needed a period to catch up and recover." The internal refrain was: "We've done things the same way for a long time. They work. Why change?"

After the IPO, Pearson had to publicly announce targets that had to be met by 2020. Reporting moved from twice a year to quarterly. When the board approved the targets, it asked one question: "That's fine, but do you have the culture to deliver these results?" That question struck a nerve with Pearson and COO Jeff Hurd. They went to look at Spark, ING and USAA; Pearson read John Doerr on OKRs and was invited by Stanford's d.school to a design thinking workshop. One specific number stopped him in his tracks: the "not in good order" rate for enrollment forms was 61% — 61% of forms had to be sent back and filled in again. Ordinary improvement asks how to bring that rate down; design thinking asks "how do we get to zero returns?"

In 2019, Pearson launched New Ways of Working (NWOW), and at year-end set up the Innovation and Design Office (IDO), handing it to Menard, his former chief of staff. Five pillars: OKRs, adaptive leadership, design thinking, enterprise agile, and dynamic enablers. A new structure: tribes (70–150 people), delivery units, centers of excellence, squads (6–10 people, cross-functional), and self-managed teams. He insisted that the IDO be staffed with internal people, bringing in McKinsey only to accelerate capability-building. Menard designed a five-day boot camp that rolled out all five pillars at once — "Doing it all at once is exhausting and scary. But if we asked people to keep coming back to learn more, we'd lose them." Once the boot camp ended, teams had to operate under NWOW. No squad could exceed 10 people.

In early 2020, Pearson took his top 30 leaders to an offsite in New York. The pre-read was David Marquet's Turn the Ship Around!. Steve Scanlon, head of Group Retirement, walked in thinking it was "another meeting to make us better managers that will evaporate afterwards." When it broke up, most people were still in "wait and see" mode. Pearson pulled Scanlon aside: you'll be the first to put this approach into practice in a business line. Scanlon figured he had no choice.

Right after the boot camp ended and squads were chosen in a single day, the world shut down because of COVID-19. The original assumption was that everyone would be in the same room. Hurd's decision was the opposite — to accelerate, because agile and design thinking were exactly the capabilities needed in uncertain times. At the same time, Pearson ended the engagement with McKinsey: "You have to burn the proverbial boats… the moment the cultural transformation is no longer being driven by Equitable's own people, it dies." Wholesalers, used to in-person visits and rounds of golf, were sent home and faced sales declines of 20%–40%. Group Retirement had 1,200 enrollers and no technology for enrolling by phone or online. Scanlon gave Bernadette Mitchell's squad a month to produce a transformation roadmap — they delivered in two weeks. They launched an MVP with some features still under development, then iterated on advisor feedback. "We would never have launched an unfinished product before."

After George Floyd's murder in May 2020, they used NWOW principles to build a talent acceleration program, TAP. By 2023, five cohorts and 24 people had completed it; 54% were promoted, and diverse employees' eNPS was 33, above the company average of 27.

Resistance appeared at the same time. Wholesalers' calendars were already full, and they refused daily stand-ups. Operations teams' work was highly standardized, manual and subject to compliance review — a single payment interaction involved more than 130 touchpoints. When Christy Chandler joined in 2023, her operations team's eNPS was just 0.7. Michael Fafian said the NWOW people were at first "a bit idealistic," unwilling to admit that operations was different. Hurd himself sat with a junior employee for an hour, watching her do something obviously inefficient and still not give up on it, before realizing that in this situation NWOW wasn't the most efficient approach. Some people with 30 years on the job and only a few left before retirement chose to leave early. Raju acknowledged that one response is: "This may no longer be the best organization for you."

By early 2025, about 36 months into NWOW, roughly 80% of the organization had embraced it. The wealth management team was in the middle of its rollout, with a very strong preference for the status quo. The scorecard: management layers cut from 26 to 5; psychological safety +25%, work-life balance +16%, performance feedback +14%; Chandler's team eNPS from 0.7 to 29.5; Group Retirement's online customer service click-through rate +400%, 13,000 more outbound calls, bringing in US$70 million in additional sales; as of December 31, 2024, Equitable's TSR since IPO was 175.5%, versus 86.1% for core peers and 116% for the S&P 500. Scanlon warned that people were now asking "why bother — the pandemic's over, there's no burning crisis." If it doesn't reach 100%, NWOW becomes a philosophy, then voluntary, then a failure.

The case ends with three questions for Pearson and Hurd: keep the 80% and let resistant pockets carry on as they are; pull acceptance through stronger metrics and oversight; or mandate 100% from the top down. And: when hiring new leaders, should they insist on choosing only those who will fully embrace NWOW?

Key Data

Dimension	Figure / Fact	Source
Company origins	Founded 1859; in 1992 AXA committed US$1 billion on condition of demutualization and listing, plus another US$450 million raised; 2018 IPO spun off from AXA, raising US$2.8 billion	A case text
Scale	Total assets of nearly US$1 trillion in 2024 (including AB etc.); Exhibit 1 balance sheet shows 2023 total assets of US$276.8 billion	A case text; Exhibit 1
Employees and structure	3,000+ employees, 20+ departments; five business divisions: Individual Retirement, Group Retirement, Investment Management and Research, AllianceBernstein, Protection Solutions	A case text; Exhibit 2
Old operating system	Books closed twice a year, 50-day turnaround, US$200 million error threshold; 1,500 policy enrollers in group insurance; 61% "not in good order" rate on enrollment forms	A case text
Industry context	US life insurance ownership 63% in 2011 → 52% in 2023; life insurers' share of market cap among the top 20 US financial firms 40% in 1985 → 13% in 2022; 2023 annuity sales US$385.4 billion, +23% year on year	A case text
Burning platform (playbook)	US life insurers' annual earnings growth 2.7% vs 5.5% for the S&P 500; NPS: US life insurance 4.5 vs USAA 77; millennials 50% of the workforce by 2025, only 4% willing to work for a US life insurer	B p.8
Burning aspiration (playbook)	About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day (Pearson said 11,000 in 2025); retired population expected +40% by 2035; 67% of retirees worry their money won't last their lifetime; retirement income gap US$28 trillion in 2015 → US$137 trillion in 2050	B p.8; end of A case text
Retirement market window	Retirement is the largest division, generating US$1 billion in cash flow a year; market peaks around 2030 at about 90 million people; Social Security in net deficit since 2016; only 50% of households say they're prepared for retirement	End of A case text
2019 segments	Individual Retirement first-year premiums US$8.2 billion, sales +12% year on year; Group Retirement full-year net inflows US$267 million; AB AUM +21%, net inflows US$25.2 billion	Exhibit 2
NWOW timeline	Launched 2019; IDO set up end of 2019; playbook ready April 2020 (just as the pandemic was declared); February 2021 playbook version says about 1/3 of the organization operating under NWOW; some departments still on the fence in 2021; looking back 36 months in early 2025, about 80% acceptance	A case text; B cover / p.9
Five pillars	OKRs; adaptive leadership; design thinking; enterprise agile; dynamic enablers (skills-first, flattening)	A case text; B p.3
Team archetypes (playbook)	Tribe ~70–150 people; CoE ~30–100 people; delivery unit 100–1,000 people (as of February 2021, not a single delivery unit had been mobilized); squad 6–10 people, cross-functional; SMT 6–15 people, same function	B p.14–15
Squad cap	No squad larger than 10 people; "Above 10 people, you can't move fast" (Raju)	A case text
Boot camp	Five days, all five pillars at once; must operate under NWOW afterwards	A case text
COVID shock	Wholesaler sales down 20%–40%; Group Retirement had 1,200 enrollers and no phone/online technology; Mitchell's squad delivered a one-month task in two weeks; unfinished MVP launched	A case text
TAP	By 2023, 5 cohorts, 24 people; 54% promoted; diverse employees' eNPS 33 vs company average 27	A case text
Operations resistance	Chandler's team eNPS 0.7 when she joined; potential touchpoints in a payment interaction >130; later rose to 29.5, above company average	A case text
Layers	Management layers cut from 26 to 5	A case text
Culture metrics	Psychological safety +25%; work-life balance +16%; performance feedback +14%; managers' days out of office down from 5 a week to 3	A case text
Group Retirement results	Online customer service click-through +400%; 13,000 more outbound calls; corresponding to US$70 million in additional sales; Raju: "Doubling speed can double revenue"	A case text
TSR (Exhibit 5c, as of 2024-12-31)	Equitable share price $47.17; 1-year TSR 45%, 3-year 55.7%, since IPO 175.5%. Core peers: 24.7% / 34.6% / 86.1%. S&P 500: 23.3% / 23.4% / 116%	Exhibit 5c
GAAP profit (Exhibit 1, treat with caution)	Net income available to common shareholders: 2018 US$1.855 billion; 2019 −US$1.764 billion; 2020 −US$701 million; 2021 US$1.676 billion; 2022 US$2.073 billion; 2023 US$1.222 billion. Heavily distorted by derivative gains and losses; not to be read directly as NWOW cause and effect	Exhibit 1
Playbook's self-positioning	"Not a how-to manual, but a set of strategies and building blocks to hand-pick according to mission"; "What you're building is an MVP"; reflects thinking as of February 2021	B p.4
Ritual density	Enterprise level: QBR, Big Room Planning; macro units: PO Sync (1 hour per sprint), monthly Review, quarterly Retro; teams: Sprint Planning, daily 15-minute stand-up, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Review, Retro. Sprints usually 2 weeks	B p.40–48
Goal system	Outcomes 3–5 years, 4–6 balanced metrics; OKRs quarterly, 3–5 objectives each with 3–5 KRs; moonshot goals count as success at 70%; Committed must hit 100% (regulatory/market commitments)	B p.24–25
Four dimensions of measurement	Maturity (survey + ritual checklist); efficiency (burndown, lead time, velocity, defects); culture (eNPS / CultureIQ); business impact (OKRs, customer NPS, net inflows, average face amount, first-year premiums)	B p.51–52

Key People

Person	Role	Stance / Role in the story	Relationships
Mark Pearson	CEO of Equitable Holdings; from Zimbabwe, no university, drove growth in Hong Kong/Japan, parachuted into New York in 2011, CEO after the 2018 IPO	Decision-maker. Launched NWOW, insisting "this is not a test, and not a pilot"; worries 80% isn't enough, asks whether to push to 100%	Handed the IDO to former chief of staff Menard; picked Scanlon for the first business line
Jeff Hurd	COO	Co-decision-maker. Decided to accelerate rather than pause in early COVID; personally sat on the front line to watch inefficient processes; asks: if leaders won't embrace it, are we willing to replace them	Faces the 80% vs 100% question alongside Pearson
Hillary Menard	Chief Innovation and Design Officer, head of the IDO, Pearson's former chief of staff	Designed and rolled out NWOW; the five-day boot camp, internal staffing, the playbook	Her appointment itself was a signal that "Mark is behind this"
Robin Raju	CFO; ran Individual Retirement during the pandemic	Witness to the old culture (books closed twice a year); NWOW put product, IT and pricing in the same squad; defines success by TSR; acknowledges NWOW can be used to identify people who don't fit	The transformer of the finance function
Steve Scanlon	Then head of Group Retirement, the first business-line pilot	Skeptical at the offsite, then delivered once handpicked; got the enroller transformation roadmap in two weeks; warns: fail to reach 100% and it turns voluntary, then fails; with managers, "two chances to get excited, the third time it's just how it is"	Pearson's first pick
Bernadette Mitchell	Head of the enroller transformation squad	Delivered a one-month task in two weeks; MVP first, iterate later	Scanlon chose her because she "will push my team"
Matthew Schirripa	Head of sales experience, Individual Retirement	Acknowledges the need to move faster, yet hears "our products are the best, no need to change"; wholesalers resisted stand-ups; later found that sharing upstream information let the back office better support the front line	A person straddling the HQ vs business-line divide
Christy Chandler	Head of operations, joined 2023	Her team said at the time "this is awful"; eNPS 0.7; used a 90-day control group; later reached 29.5	Proof that operations can transform too, but it needs adapting
Michael Fafian	SVP, Retail and Third-Party Field Service Operations	Payment touchpoints >130; 25 years on the front line, didn't buy "just automate it"; only accepted NWOW was there to help once exponential growth in new business left them unable to keep up	The archetype of operations resistance
Joan Lamm-Tennant	Chair of the board	Spoke about the power of NWOW at industry forums — external endorsement	The positive form of board pressure
Stanton Yuwono / IDO	Innovation and Design Office, set up October 2019	Compiler of the B playbook; McKinsey coached first, then got burned with the boats	The internal vehicle for culture change
Wholesalers / frontline sales	The market interface	Calendars full, stand-up = fewer client meetings; sales −20% to −40% during COVID	Hardest to fit into rituals, yet they hold the voice of the customer
Employees with 30 years in, near retirement	Internal	Leaving early is easier than adapting	Attrition, but also a filter
McKinsey	External consultants	Helped the IDO build capability fast, terminated after COVID	Pearson: "When the consultants leave, the thing dies"
Das Narayandas	Case author and the professor for this class; AllianceBernstein board member since 2017	Leads the class discussion; has an insider's view of Equitable/AB	Conflict of interest disclosed on the case's first page

Decision rights sit with Pearson and Hurd. The money comes from public shareholders (TSR is Raju's final scorecard). Opposition is concentrated in operations, wholesalers, wealth management (with an extremely strong preference for the status quo), and veteran managers who say "I'm already doing this." External pressure: the board asking whether the culture can keep up, peers advancing in areas they have no bandwidth for, and tens of thousands of Americans turning 65 every day.

Core Tensions

80% have adopted it — should the remaining 20% be pushed to 100%? This is where the professor's Q5/Q6 land. Scanlon: fail to reach 100% and it becomes a philosophy, then voluntary, then a failure. Pearson, in his own words: this is not a test, not a pilot. On the other side: the playbook itself says "hand-pick building blocks according to mission"; as of February 2021 not a single delivery unit had been mobilized; Hurd saw with his own eyes that for some operations processes NWOW was not the most efficient approach; wealth management has an extremely strong preference for the status quo. The numbers: 80% adoption vs a TSR since IPO that is already double that of peers (175.5% vs 86.1%).
Uniform principles vs uniform rituals. Squads, missions, OKRs and the voice of the customer pay off almost immediately in project-based teams; daily stand-ups, two-week sprints and Big Room Planning, dropped on wholesalers and claims processing teams, are seen as a black hole for time. The playbook describes two micro units, Squads and SMTs, yet draws the heaviest ritual calendar as a single set.
Was COVID a catalyst or a necessary condition? Without the pandemic, the enroller transformation wouldn't have had a one-month deadline, and an unfinished MVP wouldn't have been allowed to launch. But precisely because the pandemic is over, the "why bother" voices are back. That's exactly what Q4 asks.
Should embracing NWOW be a hard requirement in hiring? A leader who is a "de-enabler" can drag down a whole tribe; but tighten the condition too much and you may screen out people who dislike stand-ups but understand actuarial work, compliance or customers. The playbook's role cards already spell out "what I do / what I don't do" — the question is whether this screen applies to leadership, or to everyone.
Visible Doing vs invisible Being. The playbook itself places mindset beneath the tools, yet rituals, agendas and Betterworks/ADO take up most of its 70 pages. What shows up on the scorecard (layers 26→5, click-through +400%, TSR) is easily credited to the rituals; the real sense of urgency Pearson wants, he admits himself, hasn't yet reached the intensity it should.
Burning the boats vs keeping the consultants. Pearson terminated McKinsey because culture change had to be led by his own people. The cost: a slower capability curve, and a playbook carrying a consulting firm's Spotify vocabulary (Tribe/Squad/Chapter), so the front line asks: is this ours, or HQ pushing something down on us yet again?