Why do legacy institutions only wake up when they hit a wall?
In his new book, Hilmi Güvenal goes after that question. IBM, NHS, LEGO, Siemens. All of them hit the wall one day, then rebuilt themselves. The hammer falls in one of three places. Money, service, or law and ethics. But before the blow, the picture inside is always the same. Unquestioned rules, rituals nobody dares to break, the sentence “this is how we have always done it.”
That is the sediment of time. Reflexes that once saved lives, now turned into a layer of calcification clogging the system.
This book offers no prescription. It hands you a toolkit. For executives running legacy institutions, it opens the path to diagnosing your own house before the hammer falls, and to managing Respectful Disruption with a steady hand.
Time works on every institution. The question is not how to outrun it but how to scrape away what
it deposits and keep the core alive.
KULAK
HİLMİ GÜVENAL, has spent more than forty years in business as an executive, entrepreneur, and investor. With expertise in institutional transformation and crisis management, he continues to serve as chairman, board member, and advisor to companies across multiple sectors and countries.
His first book, Yol Yakınken, a handbook for effective executives, was named one of the three best business books of the year by Platin Magazine in 2023. His second book, Kuartet, on the art of effective decision-making under uncertainty, won Business Management Book of the Year at Ekonomi newspaper’s 2025 awards in Türkiye.
He is a graduate of Robert College, Boğaziçi University’s Department of Industrial Engineering, and Harvard Business School’s Executive Development Program. Born in Ankara in 1962, he has lived in Istanbul since 1968.
