Tales From The PROS

The episode contains a handful of usable ideas - the inevitability of a productivity dip during change, co-designing change with stakeholders, and the 'differently vs. better' distinction - but the majority of airtime is filled with platitudes, anecdotes without depth, and standard change-management boilerplate. The APEE model is only cursorily explained and yields little actionable detail.

“productivity is going to dip for sure. There is no way around that because you're doing juggling, you know, a couple of new approaches and new technologies. So productivity will dip initially. The question is for how long and how do you accelerate the process”

“when you do something better, you get an incremental gain. When you do something differently, there's a chance you'll get an exponential gain”

The APEE acronym is the guest's own framing, but the underlying ideas - start with why, technology adoption curve, Edison iteration analogy, ADKAR/Kotter references - are all well-worn change-management staples. There is little genuinely contrarian or first-principles thinking on offer.

“Kind of like that famous Ted talk that Simon Sinek did about start with why”

“There's Adkar from ProSci out there. There's the McKinsey 7S, there's the Kotter”

Cesar is a legitimate practitioner with 12+ years in change management and enablement, real ERP/CRM implementation experience, and doctoral research in organisational leadership - credible but not exceptional. He is a mid-market consultant rather than someone who has led transformations at notable scale with verifiable outcomes.

“I started working with technology companies in 2012, really, when I started that for a travel software company. And then I moved into another company that did some high performance computing”

“That's part of my research I did at the Chicago School Professional Psychology, right, as part of my PhD in organizational leadership”

A few concrete anchors exist - named platforms (Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Stripe), a SOW hours range, and the 70% stat - but no outcomes data from the guest's own engagements, no client names, no before/after metrics, and the 70% figure is dropped without a source citation.

“the S.O.W., the Statement of Work, which was for 100 hours or 500 hours, has now tripled or quadrupled because of what's being asked along the way”

“70 % of change initiatives don't succeed”

The hosts frequently redirect conversation to their own company's experiences rather than pressing the guest for depth, and offer no meaningful pushback on uncited statistics or vague claims. Questions are broad and predictable, follow-ups are minimal, and the session closes with uncritical praise rather than a substantive synthesis.

“I love it. Yeah. I know you, I know you got to run. Cesar, thank you so much. We appreciate it. think even in just, you know, 20 something minutes, we got a lot of value, a lot of golden nuggets in there”

“Let's just say a bigger company that we've worked with before that they come to us and they want us to basically build a centralized system that connects with hundreds of different third party systems”