How agility & principle entrepreneurship drive OPEX at Koch Industries
Discover how Koch industries has driven OPEX through agility and principle entrepreneurship
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Jenny Strange is the senior director of transformation strategy and design at Koch Industries. With a team dedicated to driving transformation, her role involves helping businesses refine their strategies, implementing new visions and utilizing market data for effective change.
Koch Industries, the second-largest private organization in the US, consists of about 12 different businesses, each with its own unique transformation challenges.
At OPEX Week 2025, Strange's session shared insights on balancing top-down strategic direction with bottom-up empowerment, fostering agility and embracing emerging trends. In this interview with Amelia Brand, she expands on these topics and offers her perspective on the future of business transformation.
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PEX Network: In your session, you mentioned that Koch takes both a bottom-up and a top-down approach to transformation. How do you strike the right balance between empowering individuals while also driving strategic direction from the top down?
Jenny Strange: It’s not a perfect process, but we continuously work towards that balance! As I mentioned in the session, transformation is about evolving the human system. Knowledge is dispersed throughout the organization – no single person has all the information. If you rely solely on a top-down approach, you miss insights from the people on the ground, which can lead to inefficiencies, redesigns or delays.
On the other hand, a purely bottom-up approach can create chaos. Some of our businesses lean one way or the other, but the key is ensuring that we align on vision, identify our highest-value priorities and consistently check in to stay on track.
PEX Network: You also emphasized the importance of agility in transformation. What challenges have you seen get in the way of agility over the years?
JS: The biggest challenge is culture, particularly in organizations with heavy bureaucracy. If decision-making is too centralized, it slows everything down. At Koch, we emphasize contribution motivation and principle-based entrepreneurship to counteract this. We structure compensation to incentivize a contribution mindset – employees are encouraged to take ownership, make changes where needed and advocate for investments when they see opportunities for improvement.
Another major challenge is the lack of a shared vision. This isn’t just about having a vision statement; it’s about ensuring that every team member understands the goals of the business and how their work contributes to achieving them. Without this alignment, transformation efforts can lose momentum and cracks start to appear mid-implementation.
Prioritization is also critical. Organizations often become scattered over time, taking on too many initiatives at once. Staying focused on the highest-value initiatives that drive business outcomes is key.
Finally, having the right knowledge systems in place is essential, especially as businesses evolve. Understanding relationships between applications, data, capabilities and outcomes allows for faster decision-making and problem-solving. Before launching any transformation program, we conduct thorough discovery work to identify key stakeholders, applications and data dependencies – having a well-structured knowledge system accelerates this process significantly.
PEX Network: You mentioned principle entrepreneurship earlier. Does this factor into your recruitment process? Do you actively look for these qualities from day one?
JS: Absolutely. We look for individuals who are contribution-motivated and driven to create value for Koch. Our compensation philosophy is structured to reward value creation, which fosters an environment where employees challenge the status quo and seek continuous improvement. We want people who ask tough questions, push boundaries and actively look for ways to enhance their work and the organization as a whole.
PEX Network: Looking toward the future, are there any emerging trends in transformation that you’re particularly focused on? How is Koch preparing for them?
JS: We’re actively experimenting with generative AI across our businesses. We’re also exploring spatial technologies, including augmented and virtual reality, to understand how they can be applied to our operations. Some of our businesses adopt these technologies faster than others and part of our role is to stay ahead of trends and bring external insights into the organization. Often, business leaders are focused on day-to-day operations, so we help them think about what’s next and how emerging technologies could add value.
PEX Network: Why do you personally find it important to attend events like this?
JS: It’s challenging to stay current on everything happening in the industry. Conferences like this provide valuable opportunities to hear from other professionals, learn from great speakers and discover what vendors are working on. I always walk away with a few new insights that I can bring back to my team.
PEX Network: How would you describe OPEX Week to someone who’s never attended before? Has it lived up to your expectations?
JS: I’ve been actively encouraging my colleagues to attend! One of the reasons I appreciate OPEX Week is that it brings together professionals who hold similar roles to mine at Koch. That makes it easier to connect with the right people – whether they specialize in process excellence, business operations or transformation. It’s a great opportunity to engage with peers facing similar challenges and share best practices.
The 26th Annual OPEX Week: Business Transformation World Summit | 2025 Brochure
The renowned OPEX Week: Business Transformation World Summit is returning to Miami on January 27-29, 2025, for an electric gathering of transformation leaders and pioneers shaping the industry. Celebrating 26 years of excellence, we're back with a brand-new festival theme, a show-stopping line-up and fresh content stages. We're gearing up to help you deliver ground-breaking, human-centric transformation in the age of AI.
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