Seventy percent of transformations fail. This book is about the thirty percent that don't — and why.

Companies rarely fail for lack of strategy. They fail because they mistake what they are, defending a fixed form long after the world has moved on. Kodak invented the digital camera yet could not stop being a film company. Fujifilm, IBM, and Nintendo survived the same shock by grasping a different truth: an enterprise is not a fixed thing to defend, but a living process that endures only by changing shape.

Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO? brings Lao Tzu, the Tao, and Zen to bear on the hardest realities of modern leadership. Drawing on three decades in executive search, John Wong shows that renewal begins not with another programme, but with a deeper question: what must the company become?

Inside, you'll explore:

•Why the most capable people in the room are the ones who let transformation collapse
•The four ways renewal dies — blindness, the wrong leader, the immune response, and the valley
•What separates the companies that reinvent themselves from those that quietly vanish
•How an ancient philosophy of flow speaks directly to boards, CEOs, and anyone steering change

Part meditation, part field guide, this is a book for leaders who sense the old playbooks have run out — and are ready to lead as living things do: by bending, adapting, and becoming.