The ROI Lie

The ROI Lie exposes why organizations keep approving transformations with numbers everyone knows are unreliable, then acting surprised when the promised value never appears.

Companies spend billions on digital transformation, technology, AI, restructuring, and change initiatives. The business cases look convincing. The ROI calculations work. The savings are documented. Yet months later, leaders are asking the same question: Where did the value go?

In The ROI Lie, experienced executives Vincent Messina and Ilana Esterrich challenge one of the most persistent assumptions in business: that traditional return on investment is an adequate way to evaluate transformation.

The problem isn't simply bad execution. Organizations are measuring the wrong things.

Transformation consumes more than money. It consumes organizational attention, leadership capacity, employee time, operating bandwidth, and the ability to compete and grow. Traditional ROI models rarely capture those costs, and they often count theoretical savings as value long before anything has actually changed.

Messina and Esterrich introduce a practical alternative: Return on Change, a discipline for evaluating whether transformation creates usable capacity and measurable business value.

Drawing on decades of experience across finance, technology, sales, operations, consulting, and organizational transformation, they show leaders how to ask better questions before approving an initiative, recognize when a business case is built on assumptions rather than evidence, and measure whether change actually improves the organization's ability to operate, control, compete, and grow.

Readers will learn why transformation value disappears between the business case and daily operations, how organizational attention becomes a hidden constraint on change, why technology investments fail to deliver promised outcomes, and how CFOs, executives, transformation leaders, and vendors can create greater accountability for value realization.

This isn't another change management theory. It's a practical challenge to how organizations buy, approve, govern, and measure transformation.

If your organization is investing in AI, digital transformation, enterprise technology, operational improvement, or large-scale change, The ROI Lie will change the questions you ask before signing the next business case.