Al Comeaux is a global authority on organizational change, having led and researched change within various industries and countries. He has held senior leadership roles and championed significant strategic changes such as IPOs, hostile takeovers, digital transformations, and CEO transitions. His experience includes working with startups and established corporations.
In the late 1990s, after a failed change effort, Al sought to understand why some organizational changes succeed while most fail. This led to a 20-year journey of research and practical experience, culminating in the development of Primed for Change, a project designed to prepare leaders for successful organizational change.
One of Al's notable roles was at Travelocity, where he joined in 2000 after the dot-com bubble burst. As Vice President, he played a key role in the company's growth, helping it become the 5th largest US travel agency within five years. He championed the Customer Service Guarantee initiative, driving significant technical and process changes, and reshaped Travelocity’s public image to that of a travel expert.
After five years at Travelocity, Al moved to its parent company, Sabre, as Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications. He helped launch SabreTown, an internal social network that fostered business and social connections and maintained cultural balance during a private equity leveraged buyout.
In 2010, Al joined GE Aviation, where he introduced crowdsourcing and digital capabilities and helped launch the company's purpose: “We invent the future of flight, lift people up and bring them home safely.” He also contributed to creating GE's Distributed Power business, combining multiple units across various industries and continents.
Al began his career in Washington, DC, as a Congressional staffer and consultant. He then joined American Airlines, managing labour communications and launching innovative capabilities like online travel and ticketless travel. Later, as a senior leader in America's European division, he led communications during a strategic change program.
After a brief stint as Chief Communications Officer at financial services startup Elevate, Al founded Primed for Change in 2019. In 2020, he published his debut book, "Change (the) Management: Why We as Leaders Must Change for the Change to Last," which offers insights from his extensive experience and research on organisational change.
Leaders fail two-thirds of the time at change. Why? Because we follow the common thinking about change. We think we can change our organizations, but organizations don’t change. (People do.) We focus on tactical check-the-box excellence—project management, finance-related decisions, and technology choices; these things are important, but they won’t buy us much if our people don’t change. We think we and our fellow leaders need to solve the problem from the top down, but our people are closer to the action than we are, and any change needs to be their idea—at least in part—if it’s going to stick. And, our reflexes tell us to jump full-throttle into the change when some of the most important change work happens well before we execute. It’s time for a rethink. It takes someone who’s been in your seat and made and grappled with these mistakes (and admits to them) to truly fathom and share how to finally get this right. In this keynote, I bring data and stories from my decades of living, leading, and researching change so you can avoid these pitfalls and get a step ahead in how you lead successful change, and in how you lead every day.
Never-ending change has our people fatigued, and worn out. How do we re-energize our organizations to take on the new challenges that threaten our enterprises’ very existence? We do it by bringing new energy to the fulcrum of all our changes: Our people. And we do it with a new way of thinking about leadership and change. In this speech, Al Comeaux brings his decades of leading changes at the C-level and 20 years studying changes at scores of organizations to share new insight on how we must lead change by re-energizing our teams moving forward…if we’re going to move forward at all.
Given the trillions wasted on failed change efforts each year, how must we as leaders go about change differently? What do leaders at companies that win at change do vs the unsuccessful among us? In this signature keynote, Al offers an insider’s view—having led changes of all sorts at the C-level for 20+ years, in addition to two decades studying change at scores of companies—to share a brutal truth: Organizations don’t change. People do. It turns out, change is a decision made by every single person. As leaders we lose when trying to get our people to change; we win by getting our people to want to change. How? By getting our own hands dirty as leaders. Pulling our people through the change. Understanding the invaluable role that listening and modeling play. This keynote lays out how we as leaders can win our change efforts, and this sets us up for success as leaders overall.
How do we as leaders get our people to drive fundamentally better business results than our competitors’ people? There is no silver bullet: Doing it requires us to pull many levers to affect the brain’s rational and emotional processors. We’re great at developing rational explanations for things, but neuroscience makes clear that emotion plays just as big a role. So Al developed this keynote using his 30 years in-seat as an executive at companies such as GE, Travelocity, and American Airlines, to speak with you on a different level and help you understand how to appeal to people’s hearts to drive better results. With stories that touch the brain and the heart, and with research from management, neuroscience, and social science, Al explains the importance of the heart and the principles we must live and work by if we want motivated people who will consistently outperform.
