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. And Vladimir Stankovic, digital Transformation and Commerce consultant, former C-level Executive at Nike, Camper, Farfetch/NGG, presented a new framework for how companies can build more agile talent models.
Their message was clear: the traditional approach isn’t working anymore.
Why Centers of Excellence Fail
Many large consumer goods organizations have followed a similar playbook over the past five years: build dedicated teams of digital specialists who can accelerate capabilities and guide the broader organization through transformation while coaching business leaders along the way.
As Boyd candidly shared from her experience, this approach often leads to unexpected challenges: “We thought that the answer to leapfrogging was to build in and hire full-time teams, armies of subject matter experts. Instead of charging like a boat skimming the water’s surface, we became stuck in our own wake.”
Four critical problems tend to emerge with the COE model:
1. Business Leaders Outsource Accountability
Brand managers and commercial leaders—the people accountable for business growth—often begin treating digital teams like external service providers. They don’t feel compelled to learn or change their own ways of working, creating an “us versus them” dynamic.
“Our brand leaders and commercial leaders who were accountable for our business didn’t feel compelled to change or learn,” Boyd noted. “They treated these teams like outsourced services.”
This creates a dangerous situation where the very people who need to own digital transformation are abdicating responsibility while holding onto traditional ways of working and outdated best practices.
2. Strategic Disconnection
The separation creates knowledge gaps on both sides. Digital specialists often lack crucial market, brand, and consumer context. Without being integrated into core planning meetings, they constantly miss how the marketplace is shifting and what the strategic vision actually is.
“The digital team inherently lacked market, brand, and consumer context,” Boyd explained. “They really weren’t able to execute at the level and build the confidence in the brand teams that they had their A game.”
Meanwhile, brand teams struggle to stay current with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. While everyone receives initial training, the pace of change means that knowledge quickly becomes outdated.
3. Operational Complexity
Coordination becomes cumbersome. Decision-making slows down. Handoffs between teams grow complicated. Everyone struggles to understand who owns what outcome and who makes which decisions.
“It felt complex. It felt slow. It was difficult to operate,” Boyd said, noting that feedback across organizations consistently points to complexity compromising simplicity.
4. Talent Stagnation
Perhaps most troubling is what happens to the digital specialists themselves. Beyond the typical 6-18 month window for such roles, many organizations don’t have clear career pathing for these experts.
“We weren’t training them to be larger members of our community because we were really treating them as subject matter experts,” Boyd reflected. “We weren’t actually developing this talent in the way that they could have longevity in the organization.”
The result: specialists languish, motivation declines, and top talent eventually leaves.
The Mindset Over Capability Insight
Boyd identified a crucial insight that many organizations miss: “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.”
Some leaders integrate insights, harness data, and propel forward. Others aren’t as comfortable with the agility, learning orientation, and curiosity required to take the reins of rapid change.
Technical skills aren’t the barrier—cultural attributes are.
This realization has led many organizations to shift from separate COE models to integrated approaches where digital capabilities are built directly into core business teams, with structured training agendas and a focus on cultural transformation.
“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: A Structured Alternative
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: A Decision Framework
To operationalize the 3C model, Stankovic introduces a complementary 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.
The key insight: This approach “will definitely help you to unlock some funds” by avoiding unnecessary permanent hires and automating tasks that don’t require specialized human expertise.
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.
Boyd echoed this, noting that organizations often focus too much on capability building and miss the cultural mindset shift required: “Standing still is not an option. We all know that, right? And we need to be pioneering. We need to be integrating how new tech and new skills will steward us into a new era of growth.”
If transformation is about value proposition evolution, then talent models must be equally evolutionary—morphing and adapting rather than remaining rigid.
Key Takeaways for Leaders
Based on insights from both speakers, several principles emerge:
- Question every permanent hire. Before filling any role, assess: Is this a build, buy, or borrow situation? Will this skill be relevant in 18 months? Can it be automated?
- Focus on mindset, not just capability. Technical skills are important, but curiosity, agility, and learning orientation increasingly separate successful organizations from those that struggle.
- Ensure accountability stays in the business. Digital outcomes should be owned by business leaders, not specialist teams. Brand managers and functional heads must be equipped and expected to drive digital transformation in their domains.
- Plan for skill obsolescence. Build organizational models that assume capabilities will need to evolve every 12-18 months.
- Design for integration from the start. Whether using COEs, hybrid models, or integrated teams, success requires deliberate coordination and knowledge sharing in both directions.
- Embrace productive impermanence. Recognize that some of your best talent will be with you for defined periods. Design for knowledge transfer and concentrated impact.
- Curate culture actively. Stop being a passive custodian of how things have always been done. Start actively curating what needs to emerge.
The Path Forward
The right approach will vary by organization, industry, maturity stage, and culture. But the core principle is clear: organizations that cling to rigid talent models risk being left behind, while those that embrace flexibility position themselves to capture new value.
The velocity of change isn’t slowing down. The question isn’t whether your talent model needs to evolve—it’s how quickly you can adapt while maintaining what makes your organization uniquely valuable.
For organizations considering these approaches, the speakers offered practical advice:
Start small. Don’t transform everything at once. Test Contract or Community models