The way companies approach digital transformation is fundamentally broken. By the time organizations hire specialists for today’s challenges, the market has moved on. The expensive Centers of Excellence they’ve built become obstacles rather than accelerators. And the talent models that worked for decades are crumbling under the pressure of AI, rapid technological change, and evolving workforce expectations.
At one of our LS Elevate Roundtables, two industry leaders shared contrasting but complementary insights on this challenge. Heather Boyd, VP of Transformation at Suntory Global Spirits, explained why her organization disbanded their digital COE after five years.
Their message was clear: the traditional approach isn’t working anymore.
Why Centers of Excellence Fail
Five years ago, Suntory Global Spirits—a $5 billion spirits manufacturer—thought they had the answer to accelerating digital capabilities. They would build dedicated teams of digital specialists who could guide the organization through transformation while coaching business leaders along the way.
“We thought that the answer to leapfrogging was to build in and hire full-time teams, armies of subject matter experts,” Boyd explained. “Instead of charging like a boat skimming the water’s surface, we became stuck in our own wake.”
Four critical problems emerged:
- Business leaders outsourced accountability. Brand managers and commercial leaders treated digital teams like external service providers. They didn’t feel compelled to learn or change their own ways of working, creating an “us versus them” dynamic.
- 2Strategic disconnection widened. Digital specialists lacked market and brand context because they weren’t integrated into core planning. Meanwhile, brand teams didn’t stay current with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Strategic gaps emerged everywhere.
- Operations became complex. Coordination was cumbersome. Decision-making slowed. Handoffs grew complicated. Everyone struggled to understand who owned what outcome.
- Top talent left. Suntory didn’t have career pathing for digital specialists beyond 6-18 months. They weren’t developing these experts as broader organizational leaders, and the best people eventually left.
The root cause? “What we had missed is we really were focusing on capability and not on the mindset that’s required to go harness this in our core employees,” Boyd said.
Some leaders were integrating insights and propelling forward. Others weren’t comfortable with the agility, learning orientation, and curiosity required. Technical skills weren’t the barrier—cultural attributes were.
This isn’t just about being comfortable with technology – it’s about fundamentally different expectations for how brands should engage, respond, and deliver value. With a projected population of 2.2 billion by 2024 and an estimated economic footprint of $5.46 trillion by 2029, Gen Alpha isn’t just the next generation – they are the generation that will define business success for the next three decades.
However, these traditional categories are facing significant headwinds from changing consumer behaviors and digital transformation. The hypothesis he’s operating under is clear: “In order to grow the business, we would need to expand the brand into adjacent categories.”
This scenario is playing out across numerous heritage CPG and retail brands. The very categories that built these companies are now facing headwinds from digital transformation, changing consumer behaviors, and evolving market dynamics.
The Solution: Integration and Mindset
About nine months ago, Suntory made a decisive change. They disbanded the COE model entirely and integrated digital capabilities directly into core business teams.
This wasn’t about eliminating digital expertise. It was about putting accountability where it belonged—with the business leaders who own growth outcomes.
The new approach included:
- Structured training agendas to build digital literacy actively, not passively
- Cultural transformation focused on agility, learning, and curiosity
- Redefined role expectations where brand managers own digital outcomes
- Business leaders who coordinate across functions and harness data, not just set vision
“The business today is not going to be your business 18 months from now,” Boyd noted. “How do you build the right talent to be able to lead teams through that type of change?”
The 3C Hybrid Team Model
Vladimir Stankovic took a different approach to solving the same problem. After nearly 20 years building COEs at major brands, he’s developed what he calls the “3C Hybrid Team Model”—a framework that recognizes different talent needs require different engagement models.
The Velocity Mismatch
Stankovic identified the core issue: “By the time we hire somebody for a challenge we think is the core challenge, we figure out that competition or the market or consumer is really going into different directions.”
This creates what he calls “legacy costs and legacy skills.” Organizations invest heavily in permanent hires for capabilities that become obsolete or automated within 18 months.
His question before any hire: “Can it be done with AI? Can it be automatized?”
The Three Pillars
Stankovic’s model consists of three complementary talent layers:
1. Core+: The Cultural Curators Permanent leaders who serve as vision and cultural stewards, augmented with constant external perspective through advisors and mentors. They’re not custodians maintaining the status quo—they’re curators actively shaping what emerges.
Examples: C-suite, middle management, board advisors, external mentors
2. Contract: The Embedded Experts Specialists brought in for 6-18 month missions to inject expertise and execute high-stakes projects at speed. They integrate fully during their tenure but have defined scope and timelines.
“We do not have skillset internally, we do not know what we do not know,” Stankovic explained. “A person or a team comes in, hybrid integrated into a local setup, but then comes expertise and executes high-stakes projects at speed.”
Examples: CRM project leads, AI integration experts, marketplace entry specialists
3. Community: The On-Demand Talent Cloud A flexible network of vetted specialists you can tap for specific, shorter-term needs. Think of it as an “open source of talents” for challenging current approaches, pilot projects, or bringing fresh perspectives.
Examples: Designers, data analysts, researchers, technical specialists
Build, Buy, or Borrow
To operationalize this model, Stankovic offers a simple decision framework:
- Build internal capabilities that represent your long-term competitive advantage—your core value proposition.
- Buy (via Contract) expertise you need quickly for finite missions where you’re not specialized.
- Borrow (via Community) for strategic but one-time needs, pilots, or when you want to challenge current thinking.
Making Hybrid Models Work
Both speakers acknowledged that changing talent models raises legitimate concerns:
Culture: Won’t constant turnover disrupt organizational culture? Stankovic argues the opposite. In rapidly changing environments, culture must be actively curated, not passively maintained. Static culture is the real risk.
Cohesion: How do temporary and permanent team members work together? Through outcome-driven culture where everyone understands shared objectives. “It’s not going to be super close tight team spirit like in the past,” Stankovic acknowledged, “but it is necessity.”
Cost: External expertise seems expensive, but hidden costs of permanent hires for rapidly evolving skills—opportunity costs, severance, legacy drag—often exceed them.
Strategic Imperatives for C-Suite Leaders
One debate that emerged: Does the future favor specialists or generalists?
The answer is nuanced. Deep expertise matters, but the ability to learn and adapt matters more. The shift is toward “adaptive specialists” with critical meta-skills:
- Identifying real problems, not just surface symptoms
- Exploring solutions beyond past experience
- Developing structured answers to ambiguous challenges
- Rapidly acquiring new skills as landscapes shift
“I slowly tend to put way more effort into talents that are really capable, identifying real problems, looking what solutions are out there, and coming up with structured answer, not just from their previous experience,” Stankovic said.
What Digital Transformation Really Means
Both speakers pushed back on conventional thinking about digital transformation.
“Digital transformation is not about technology,” Stankovic emphasized. “Digital transformation is about evolving value proposition.”
He cited Philip Morris—a tobacco company transforming into a health company through real-time body measurement devices—as the revelatory example.
If transformation is about value proposition evolution, then talent models must be equally evolutionary—morphing and adapting rather than remaining rigid.
The Path Forward
For organizations considering these approaches, the speakers offered practical advice:
Start small. Don’t transform everything at once. Test Contract or Community models