In nearly every company today, the word “transformation” gets used the way people once used “innovation” – with hope, with urgency, and often with nothing truly changing. The gap between what leaders envision and what organizations actually execute is widening. And if you ask Abby Knowles, a technology executive turned strategic advisor with almost three decades at Verizon, the reason is both obvious and vastly underestimated.
“We keep acting as if transformation is just a technology delay,” says Knowles. “But transformation is a people-driven, culture-driven process. You can scale efficiency, but you can also scale waste. And most organizations forget about the latter.”
Knowles has built a career on leading transformations by balancing both. After 28 years inside one of the world’s largest, most complex enterprises – overseeing everything from billion-dollar budgets to software delivery models that touched nearly every Verizon customer – she now works with large enterprises, mid-market firms, and scaling CEOs who need someone who can see the whole chessboard and execute across it. Her advisory work blends strategic clarity with hands-on leadership, a rare hybrid in a market saturated with consultants who design without the real life context of hard earned, in-the-trenches success.
And she didn’t arrive here by accident.
The Quiet Turning Point
Knowles never had a cinematic “I quit” moment. Instead, she describes an internal shift that began three years ago, during what she calls her “December Leadership Lab”: a personal ritual of evaluating identity, purpose, and impact.
“I realized I wanted to have bigger impact,” she said. “Technology was entering this moment where AI, automation, and quantum computing were about to disrupt everything. I could feel that leaders everywhere were going to need help navigating the change. And I wanted to support more organizations than just one.”
Her move into independent advisory work wasn’t an escape from corporate life. It was an expansion and an evolution into the role she had effectively been playing informally for years: the integrator, the translator, the person who could build trust across business, technology, finance, and security teams who often struggled to even speak to one another.
That tension, she says, is the core reason most transformations stall.
The Transformation Gap No One Wants to Admit
“Companies say transformation requires culture. They say they need change management. They say people matter,” Knowles said, laughing softly. “But they rarely invest in engineering the culture that the strategy requires. They spend a lot of money on the technology but the successful ones often end up lucky because they have someone behind the scenes self-motivated to engineer the culture and processes to maximize the transformation.”
The biggest misconception? That a good strategy is enough. In her experience, half of transformation strategies aren’t aligned with organizational reality. And even when they are, they rarely account for operational guardrails like capacity management, data integrity, or cybersecurity.
“Everyone focuses on the tech,” she said. “Very few focus on the human systems that determine how to make the tech deliver on the promise.”
This belief became the foundation for her proprietary Bridge T5 Framework – a trust-centered blueprint that helps organizations align technology, business, and security teams through five pillars: clarity, communication fluency, collaboration, accountability, and empathy with cultural intelligence.
It’s not theory. It’s what she used to lead some of Verizon’s most complex transformations.
Why Trust Is the Fastest Path to ROI
Years ago, Knowles was asked to lead a sweeping software transformation in Verizon’s consumer business; a $100 billion division responsible for everything from billing systems to the apps customers use to check their data. The project touched every experience customers had with the company. And it was already mid-flight.
Knowles didn’t come from traditional software development. She came from network engineering. She also came with something more valuable: systems thinking and deep relationships across the enterprise. She understood how the business operated, what the CFO needed to see to approve changes, how operations teams thought, and where friction naturally occurred.
That cross-functional communication fluency accelerated the work.
She moved business teams into a new funding model. She aligned product and engineering groups around unified KPIs. She built communication channels that removed ambiguity instead of creating it. Her team established metrics that encouraged momentum, without weaponizing scorecards – a common mistake in transformation efforts.
And she did all of this across time zones, cultures, and global teams.
The result: a transformation that competitors often needed a decade to complete was executed in just three years. Product ROI began hitting by late summer instead of December. Product quality improved by 40 percent. Trust between business and technology strengthened to the point that investment into the software organization nearly doubled.
“It wasn’t perfect,” she said. “There were pain points. Some product areas struggled. But if leaders commit to trust, accountability, and empathy, you can navigate the thorns.”
It’s that mindset she now teaches boards, CIOs, CTOs, founders, and PE-backed CEOs facing overwhelming complexity.
What Today’s Tech Leaders Actually Need
The next generation of technology leadership, Knowles believes, will be defined by three things.
First: true technical fluency.
Too many leaders, she argues, rely on teams to understand emerging technologies while they remain several steps removed.
“It’s not optional anymore,” she said. “You are a technology leader. You must understand the technology. The same applies to business leaders: they and their teams must increase their technology acumen so they can accelerate the power of business+IT.”
Second: business fluency.
AI is collapsing the gap between business and tech. Tech leaders who cannot articulate financial impact, operational risk, or security implications will be sidelined.
And third: cultural intelligence.
Global teams, cross-border development, and distributed workforces mean that innovation is increasingly a cultural negotiation. Leaders who cannot build psychological safety and trust across differences simply cannot lead transformation.
“These aren’t soft skills,” she said. “These are accelerator skills.”
A New Role in a Shifting Ecosystem
As major corporations increasingly bring in niche specialists for second opinions in conjunction with big consulting firms, Knowles sees a natural evolution unfolding.
“At an aggregate level, the big firms create the strategy,” she said. “But execution is always customized. That’s where specialists can dislodge friction and accelerate results.”
Her role is not to replace enterprise consultants. It’s to break bottlenecks, align teams, and bring the on-the-ground realism that only someone who has led transformation inside a Fortune 50 can offer.
A Legacy of Better Leadership
When asked what legacy she hopes to leave, Knowles paused.
“I want leaders to be able to help their organizations to be unafraid of technology,” she said finally. “I want them to build cultures where people feel trust, clarity, and momentum. And I want them to understand that transformation isn’t something you manage. It’s something you model.”
In a business landscape defined by disruption, Abby Knowles is offering something increasingly rare: a blueprint not just for transformation, but for leadership that can actually sustain it.
For more insights on building trust-centered technology cultures and leading transformation with confidence, connect with Abby at https://asktechworks.com/
