--- ---  # The CEO’s New Question Isn’t “What’s the Plan?” ## Video: PMI launches the new Manifesto for Enterprise Agility [Watch (HLS stream): PMI launches the new Manifesto for Enterprise Agility](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/4YDWWCMq.m3u8) (1:25)  _Published 2026-05-06. Enterprise agility, Agile leadership, Organizational agility, Business transformation, Change management, Future of leadership, Agile organizations, AI in leadership, Enterprise transformation, Adaptive organizations, What enterprise agility actually means, How companies become more agile, Leadership in fast-changing environments, How CEOs are restructuring organizations, AI changing executive leadership, Distributed decision-making in organizations, Why companies are eliminating annual budgets, Building organizations for change, How agile leadership works at scale_  #### _A working dinner in Paris with the Drucker Forum and TIME on what enterprise agility actually demands of the people in charge._ By Project Management Institute At a Paris salon dinner convened by Project Management Institute (PMI) with the Drucker Forum and featuring TIME, CEOs explored what it means to be built for change. The most striking moment of the evening was a quiet one. Michael Lurie, Chief Transformation Officer at Bayer, was describing how the 160-year-old, 100,000-employee company has organized itself to keep reinventing. Almost in passing, he mentioned that Bayer no longer sets annual budgets. In their place, Bayer runs thousands of semi-autonomous units. Each one operates in 90-day cycles, accountable for delivering incremental, visible value to a customer or stakeholder. Funding follows progress, not annual approval. The central ritual of corporate planning, in one of the most regulated industries on earth, has been deliberately retired. That is what being built for change can actually look like. It is also what the [Manifesto for Enterprise Agility](https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/research/manifesto-for-enterprise-agility-final.pdf?rev=3dc93c09681947768c45f3b6f244a0fc), recently released by PMI and Agile Alliance, asks executives to confront. The Manifesto opens with a question that reframes the CEO’s job: not “What is our plan?” but “Are we built for change?” The executives in the room for the working dinner in Paris agreed quickly that the inherited model of leadership does not do enough to prepare for change. They were less unanimous on what should replace it. **The end of the top-down reflex** Richard Straub, President of the Global Peter Drucker Forum, framed the night’s tension in his opening remarks. “The old ways were very much this hierarchy-based, top-down approach, but the old ways will not work anymore,” he said. “The question is what this new paradigm should be and how do we do it?” The Manifesto’s answer is uncomfortable for most executives. Move authority and decision-making to where value is actually created: closer to customers, closer to data, closer to the work itself. In practice, that means leaders giving up the very thing their careers were built on accumulating. Yannick Carriou, President and CEO of Médiamétrie, has lived the trade-off. “We transformed the organization into something really agile at scale, which means philosophically, we had to renounce a lot of power.” For him, handing decisions to teams was not a delegation tactic. It was a structural choice. The leader’s job becomes setting direction and removing friction, not pre-approving moves. Bayer’s abolition of the annual budget is the same idea, written in a different ledger. An annual budget is, fundamentally, a permission system. It centralizes choices about what gets funded, by whom, for how long. Killing it is not a cost-control move. It is a transfer of decision rights, away from headquarters and toward the people doing the work. **Purpose as the only viable anchor** If decisions are pushed outward, something has to hold the organization together. The Manifesto is blunt about what: “Agility is anchored in long-term purpose. When people know where they’re going and why, they can act faster with less supervision. Purpose unites teams when conditions change. By linking individual goals, incentives and measurements to enterprise outcomes, teams co-create with a culture of shared ownership.” Around the table, the same point returned in different words. Lurie described purpose less as a slogan than as an operating constraint. “The purpose is very, very important,” he said. “We believe that the purpose of any organization is to create value for its stakeholders. We define value as meeting a human need. We want everybody to be absolutely obsessed with creating value every single day.” That obsession is what gives Bayer’s structure its coherence. Thousands of teams, each on 90-day cycles, are not pursuing whatever local goals they invent. They are running fast toward an end the organization has agreed on. Without a sharp purpose, distributed authority becomes drift. With one, it becomes speed. **People are not the obstacle** Conventional wisdom says employees resist change. The data tell a different story. A 2025 [study by Pluxee](https://www.pluxeegroup.com/pluxee-reveals-the-new-rules-of-employee-engagement/) found that 83 percent of workers love or like their job, even amid transformation fatigue. Resistance, when it appears, is usually a response to something else: change asked of people without being designed around them. “People actually want to create relationships and connections at work,” said Viktoria Otero Del Val, Chief Revenue Growth Officer at Pluxee in the US and UK. “They actually want to be heard.” The cost of ignoring that, she added, is straightforward: “If organizations don’t tap into where people are in their lives, priorities, and engagement, then change becomes exhausting.” That maps directly to one of the Manifesto’s four values, “human centricity amidst change,” and to a quieter argument running through the entire document. Organizations don’t transform. People do.  **Setting vision, and doing things themselves** A second admission emerged later in the evening, this one quieter. Most of the CEOs in the room had begun using agentic AI directly. They were drafting strategy memos with it. They were running their own analyses. They were automating bureaucratic loops that used to require three meetings and a deck. That detail matters more than it sounds. It points to a new shape for the executive job. Vision and purpose move up. Decision-making moves out, toward customers and teams. And a surprising amount of the work in between, the analytical and procedural layer that has long been the province of middle management, is being pulled directly under the CEO with the help of AI. The Manifesto names this third leg explicitly. Among its nine principles is “Embrace technology and distributed talent.” Its description: “Technology, data, AI and distributed talent are core to how companies create value, make decisions, compete and respond in a fast changing environment.” That triangulation is also what makes Bayer’s structure plausible at scale. Thousands of 90-day teams running without an annual budget would have collapsed under the coordination cost a decade ago. AI is now absorbing much of that cost. The implication is awkward to say aloud and difficult to ignore. The classic management pyramid had a top, a middle, and a base. Distributing authority downward thins the middle from below. CEOs using AI to do work themselves thins it from above. The organizations getting built for change are not just flatter. They are differently shaped. **Coherence, not control** The conversation kept circling a paradox. Agility is often confused with looseness: quick reactions, light structures, permission to improvise. The leaders in the room rejected that framing. “It’s not a free-for-all. We have to adapt to change at scale, without losing coherence,” said Pierre Le Manh, President and CEO of Project Management Institute. “So it’s about making decisions faster, being able to allocate your resources in a very deliberate way. It’s about making sure your strategy is as resilient as possible when the environment is changing every single day.” The distinction between coherence and control may be the hardest shift the Manifesto asks of executives. Control is what hierarchies were designed to produce. They make outcomes predictable and accountability traceable. They work when the future resembles the past. Coherence is what enterprises need now, when the future does not, and it asks something more demanding of leaders: to accept variance, including the occasional public failure, in exchange for speed and adaptability. It is built through clear purpose, shared outcomes, guardrails rather than gatekeepers, and trust in teams to act without asking permission. Sometimes, as at Bayer, it is built by deliberately retiring the rituals that used to feel like good management. The Paris salon adjourned without a definitive answer. That was the point. Being built for change is not a destination, but a discipline. Even the leaders furthest along still describe it as a work in progress. The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility is the foundational document on which CEOs can begin to build their businesses for change. 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