There is the future you have committed to, and there is how work actually gets done today. This distance between what leaders say on stage and what teams do on Monday morning persists because most organizations are still running an outdated playbook designed for a slower, more predictable world.
Today, our world is defined by uncertainty. Something has to change.
Work is broken.
Not the strategy. Not the talent. Not the effort. The way of working itself. And there is an equity cost: when the rules stay implicit, the loudest voices and the most positional power win by default.
Bureaucracy and bloated teams that slow everything down.
Decision gridlock in a matrix where ownership and authority never quite line up.
Meeting overload, and death by consensus that produces no movement.
Fear of failure: leaders ask for experiments, then punish the failures experiments require.
AI theater: everyone adopts tools, and nobody's actual work gets faster. Then burnout.
The Cost Of The Status Quo
What is fixing these challenges worth to you?
Independent research
Imagine your org has~5,000 employees·$2 billion in annual revenue.
Executives spend 37% of their time on decisions. Most of it is poorly used.
$37M
if your top 10% of leaders make ~$200K per year.
— McKinsey, 2023
Roughly a third of all meeting time produces no outcome.
$100M+
wasted every year on unproductive and unnecessary meetings.
— Otter.ai / UNC Charlotte, 2022
Large capital projects average 79% cost overruns and 52% schedule delays.
$79M
at risk on ~$100M of CAPEX investment (5% of revenue).
— McKinsey, 2022
62% of employees are not engaged. The productivity gap is 18%.
$44M
in lost productivity from disengaged employees, every year.
— Gallup, 2024
Your way of working isn't just a people problem. It's a business problem.
The Lies We Love
Three alluring myths are holding you back.
Lie 01
"We just need a better strategy to win."
Even your smartest plans aren't enough if your teams can't bring them to life.
Lie 02
"Superstar talent leads to superstar teamwork."
Teamwork is a discipline, not a byproduct of collecting good people.
Lie 03
"If we work harder, we'll get better results."
Pushing harder through broken ways of working produces burnout and turnover.
A Better Way To Work
The team is the atomic unit of change.
Strategy, talent, and effort are essential, but they're just not enough. The missing element is great teamwork.
After more than ten years of leading this work inside large, complex global organizations, August has proven a model that uses teams to simultaneously deliver your biggest strategic priorities faster, drive growth and efficiency, and improve your culture and engagement.
We deliver change that makes a difference in how people work. Every day.
A Better Way To Work
There's a better way to work.
01
Organizing for Impact
Structure teams around the outcomes that matter, not the boxes on the chart. Roles, not souls; never more than about nine people; a clear mission and a deliberate cadence, anchored by a living team charter rather than a RACI that changes nothing.
02
Deciding in Uncertainty
The decision question shifts from "is this the right answer?" to "is this safe enough to try?" That single reframe is the antidote to death by consensus, and the practice clients still quote back to us years later.
03
Designing for Learning
Build a rhythm that makes it easy to test, adapt, and pivot. Teams work in public, shipping work in progress on a cadence and treating failure as information. The messy draft builds trust faster than the big reveal.
AI
Partnering with AI. The real value isn't individuals using better tools in isolation, it's team intelligence: AI in the room and on the table, changing how a team decides, coordinates, and ships. Woven through all three, not bolted on beside them.
Our Capabilities
How we transform the way you work.
We help organizations build the conditions for teams to do their best work, and then sustain them. Start anywhere; we transform the whole system.
Teams
The atomic unit of change. We accelerate how teams collaborate, decide, and deliver, because the team is where the work actually gets done and where culture is real.
Culture
The values, behaviors, and norms people actually live by. We make the implicit explicit and turn it into concrete daily practices, not a poster on the wall.
Systems
The operating system behind the work: governance, roles, decision rights, and rituals. We design the structures that let great work happen instead of quietly fighting it.
Leaders
The visible champions of the new way. We align leaders around a shared vision and new ways of leading, because if leaders don't go first, the change does not stick.
AI
Embedded across every intervention: augmenting how teams work, how culture takes shape, how systems run, and how leaders decide. Connective tissue, not a separate workstream.
You can start anywhere. We'll help you transform the whole system.
What An Engagement Actually Looks Like
We don't train or roll out a framework. We embed.
Our best partnerships follow one arc: prove it with a few real teams, embed it until it's the default, scale it by pull, then reinvent the whole operating model.
Phase 01 · Pilot
First 90 days
Prove it with a few real teams
Two or three pilot teams take on missions that genuinely matter, each backed by a senior sponsor. An August coach works in the room, not a workshop. The goal is a visible win the rest of the organization wants to copy.
Scope2–3 pilot teams
Phase 02 · Embed
Months 3–9
Make the new way the default
The practices become how the pilot teams actually work, not an initiative. We start certifying your first internal coaches and facilitators, so the capability begins living inside your walls instead of ours.
Scope addsInternal coaches & facilitators
Phase 03 · Scale
Months 9–18
Spread by pull, not mandate
Demand pulls the work outward to more teams and new regions. A growing champion network carries it further than any consultant could, and the vocabulary quietly becomes your own.
Scope addsMore teams · regions · champion network
Phase 04 · Transform
Year 2 and beyond
Reinvent the operating model
We run multiple workstreams in parallel across Teams, Leaders, Systems, and Culture, aligning leadership, HR, governance, and rituals so the new way sustains itself. Then we hand off and leave you independent.
Running in parallelTeams · Leaders · Systems · Culture
And the language becomes yours: SLAM at PepsiCo, FEED at Colgate, PACE at McCain, Responsive at Chanel and Talbots, Everyday Change at Estée Lauder.
The Proof
What happens when teams operate inside a better system.
PepsiCo
Five pilot teams became the way of working across roughly 60 markets. Published by Harvard, and featured by Amy Edmondson in HBR's "Agility Hacks."
Colgate
A 200-year-old company scaled to 100+ teams and 150+ internal coaches, with third-party-validated gains in risk-taking and responsiveness.
McCain
Four pilot teams in fall 2024 grew to 22 PACE teams and 556+ practitioners across five regions. One 14-week sprint identified tens of millions in potential CAPEX savings.
The model travels across industries, scales, and cultures.
In Their Words
What our clients have to say.
“Slides about empowerment are nice, but we needed something broader and more pragmatic. August provided an extremely practical toolkit and hands-on coaching that helped us drive meaningful change in our day-to-day work.”
— Head of Supply Chain
“Without August, we would lack the ability to compete at our best in a fast-paced environment.”
— President & CMO
“The transformation that August has seeded within our organization is such a big gift. Our people and teams need this new way of working if we want to achieve our mission.”
— VP, Patient and Employee Experience
“Thanks to August for pushing our thinking beyond our preconceived notions of what is possible.”
— Global Head of Change
“It was a perfect recipe. You truly took a human-centered design approach to improve decision-making. You brought deep, deep expertise in decision-making practices and localized it to our specific needs. It came together in such a way that it enabled us to be truly effective.”
— Global Head of Culture, Diversity & Belonging
“August was instrumental in helping us set the foundation for a more inclusive team.”
— Sr. Director, Inclusion & Belonging
The First Step Is A Short Conversation
A 30-minute diagnostic. No deck, no obligation.
We map where you are, where you are trying to go, and the fastest way to get you moving.
Where do we begin?
Let's talk about your teams · aug.co
Every engagement includes 100 complimentary copies of Teams That Meet the Moment by Karina Mangu-Ward.
