Using the infamous New Coke failure, Vibhu Kapoor, Regional VP – Middle East, Africa & India at Epicor, identifies five forces that can quietly derail transformation and argues that successful technology adoption requires businesses to apply the same rigour to employee buy-in as they do to systems, processes and investment.
We live in an age of data confidence. We’re told data is the new oil, and there’s truth in that. But a singular obsession with data can create a dangerous blind spot, one where the numbers tell us we’re right, while everything else is quietly going wrong. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than what happened to Coca-Cola in 1985.
The company ran 200,000 blind taste tests, generated overwhelming evidence, and concluded that consumers preferred a new, sweeter formula. Executives launched New Coke with total conviction and then, just seventy-nine days later, they quietly reversed the decision.
The data had been correct. The logic had been sound. But Coca-Cola had made a fundamental error. They treated a deeply human decision as a purely rational one. They had measured preference without understanding attachment.
I think about that story often when I’m in conversations with operations and manufacturing leaders across this region. Because right now, many of them are facing the most significant transformation pressure of their careers and most of the risk isn’t in the technology they’re selecting or the processes they’re redesigning. It’s in the same place Coca-Cola’s risk was. The human side.
A Region at an Inflection Point
The context is one most leaders in this region know well. Localisation mandates such as Vision 2030, Operation 300bn, and broader Gulf diversification drives, have shifted industrial ambition from aspiration to obligation. Simultaneously, the fragility of extended global supply chains has accelerated the push to build genuine manufacturing capability closer to home. Boards, customers, and governments are all pulling in the same direction.
The result is that organisations which have never had to move fast, are suddenly being asked to move very fast indeed. And just like Coca-Cola, many organisations risk making decisions that appear to be data-driven, yet are fundamentally flawed in their execution.
“What separates a transformation that lands from one that stalls isn’t the quality of the technical implementation, it’s whether equal rigour is applied to the human case.” – Vibhu Kapoor, Regional VP – Middle East, Africa & India at Epicor
The Overlooked Inhibitors
A 2023 Bain & Company survey found that only 12% of business transformations achieve their original ambition. The strongest predictor of success wasn’t technical planning or capital investment, it was how well organisations managed their people through the transition.
In my experience, there are five forces that quietly kill change initiatives from the inside. What concerns me about the current moment is that the same external pressures accelerating the need for transformation are also amplifying every one of them.
The first is uncertainty. When a new system or process is announced, frontline employees don’t see the strategic rationale, they see immediate, personal questions. Will I be able to keep up? Will my role still exist? In organisations where job security has historically been stable, that uncertainty lands harder.
The second is fear of loss. People build expertise, routines, and identity around the way they currently work. Change threatens that, even when the new approach is objectively better. In the region’s manufacturing sector, where long tenure is common and deep process knowledge is a source of professional pride, this fear is particularly acute.
The third is peer resistance. In high-context cultures informal consensus carries enormous weight. If the respected voices on the shop floor are sceptical, that scepticism moves through an organisation faster than any formal communication plan. One committed manager cannot out-communicate a team that has collectively decided to wait things out.
The fourth is a lack of structured change strategy. Most organisations treat transformation as a technical exercise. They invest in the system, the process, the training, and assume human adoption will follow. It rarely does without deliberate effort.
The fifth is change fatigue. In an environment where disruption is arriving from multiple directions simultaneously, people become exhausted. Consequently, their capacity to absorb the next initiative shrinks with every cycle.
Building the Human Case
What separates a transformation that lands from one that stalls isn’t the quality of the technical implementation, it’s whether equal rigour is applied to the human case.
That means being specific about what changes and why — not at the level of strategic objectives, but at the level of daily work. It means answering honestly what’s in it for the people being asked to change, and making those answers concrete rather than abstract. It means connecting urgency to realities the frontline can see and feel, not just to boardroom targets. And it means communicating relentlessly, through informal channels, as much as formal ones, because in this region’s workplace culture, what a trusted peer says in a corridor often carries more weight than what appears on a company intranet.
The Window Is Narrowing
The industrial opportunity in front of the Middle East is real. The capital is flowing, the mandates are in place, and the appetite for building genuine manufacturing capability has never been stronger. But appetite and execution are not the same thing, and the gap between them is almost always human.
Coca-Cola had the data. They had the investment. They had the confidence. What they were missing was any serious reckoning with the people on the other side of the decision. The same principle applies today. Technology may enable transformation, but people ultimately determine whether it succeeds.
