When a storm rolls across the plains, cows run east, away from it. But storms move east too. They end up running with the pain, prolonging it.
Bison do the opposite. They turn, charge directly into the storm, and come out the other side faster.
I first heard this from Prabha Dhandapani, MCA, who leads technology and AI transformation at scale. It stopped me cold, because I've lived both sides of it. So has she.
When accountability has to be built in, not bolted on
When I led a financial transformation for a $10 billion enterprise, we faced a different kind of storm: the organizational gravity that pulls savings targets toward vagueness and shared ownership toward no ownership.
We made a deliberate choice early. Rather than treating savings as a future aspiration to be realized once the work was done, we defined them upfront and built them directly into the P&Ls of each business unit, before the project started. The BUs had to accept and own the savings as a condition of beginning.
It was uncomfortable. It created tension before we had built any goodwill to spend. But it also created accountability that no governance structure could have manufactured later. By making the hard thing a prerequisite, we eliminated the drift that kills most transformation programs, the slow erosion of ambition that happens when savings remain someone else's target.
We ran into the storm. And we came out faster for it.
When the window won't wait
When Prabha was launching Retire+ in Australia, the market opportunity was time-bound. Speed wasn't a preference, it was the strategy.
This was a greenfield build from scratch: a new Azure-based core platform, global integrations spanning the U.S., Australia, and Europe, and cross-regional teams that had never worked together before. The conventional instinct would have been to phase it, sequence it, reduce the short-term discomfort.
Instead, they treated it like a startup. Rapid operating model design. Early structural decisions made before all the information was in. Immediate visibility into capability gaps rather than discovering them later. Tight alignment across global teams from the start.
Conventional pacing would have felt safer. It also would have cost them the market window.
By charging directly into the complexity, they stood up the platform, integrated globally, and aligned people faster than any phased legacy approach would have allowed.
That was a storm worth charging.
But here's what the metaphor doesn't tell you
Bison don't charge every storm.
They read the conditions. They move together. And they know the difference between a storm worth charging and terrain not worth crossing.
That's the real leadership question, and it's harder than it looks.
In today's environment, AI acceleration, cost pressure, organizational redesign, market volatility, the storms are real and they're not waiting. But the right response isn't always the same.
Sometimes leaning in decisively is the only move. When delay becomes its own risk. When ambiguity is costing you more than action would. When the window is open now and won't be later.
Sometimes pacing change thoughtfully is the smarter path. When the organization isn't ready to absorb the speed. When you're building something that needs to last beyond the urgency of the moment.
The leaders who get this right aren't just bold or just patient. They're calibrated. They know which storm to charge, and they've built teams that can tell the difference.
Questions worth sitting with
When did you charge the storm, and what made it the right call?
When did patience turn out to be the wiser strategy?
What signals told you which path to take?