A comprehensive case study of August's team acceleration model in action at McCain Foods, plus a decade of results across PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, Bayer, Genentech, and more. Our approach has been published in Harvard Business Review. This is what the evidence shows.
Most organizations invest heavily in leadership development, culture programs, and team trainings. The programs are smart. The frameworks are sound. And almost none of it sticks.
It doesn't stick because the daily systems of work — how meetings run, how decisions get made, how handoffs happen — remain unchanged. The say-do gap isn't a people problem. It's a design problem.
August exists to close that gap. Not with more training, but by redesigning how teams actually coordinate — and coaching them through the transition until the new habits are self-sustaining.
Every company in our portfolio started with strong values and sound leadership principles. What they lacked was the connective tissue between principle and practice: the difference between knowing what good looks like and actually doing it every day.
Surface what's actually happening — not what the survey says, but how decisions really get made, where trust breaks down, and which coordination points are encoding the wrong behaviors. Qualitative depth layered on whatever data already exists.
A coach joins the team's real work — not as a trainer running workshops, but as an active coach introducing practices at actual decision points, meetings, and handoffs. Weekly cadence. 12-week sprints tied to real deliverables. The team practices new habits while shipping real work.
Every practice is co-designed with the team, so the client owns it from day one. August builds internal coaching capability, facilitator networks, and playbooks — then steps back. The goal is independence, not a retainer.
The unit of change is the team, not the individual. We coach teams as systems — the practices are about how people coordinate, not personal development plans.
McCain Foods runs on four leadership principles, translated into eight languages, and a 2030 strategy that demands cross-functional speed. But there was a gap between what the principles said and what actually happened in meetings, decisions, and handoffs.
Strategic priorities moved slower than they needed to. Decisions bottlenecked at senior levels. Teams operated in silos. They didn't need another training program. They needed a different way of working.
So in the fall of 2024, leadership made a bet.
Leadership committed to a small experiment: four cross-functional pilot teams, each chartered with a 12-week mission tied to a real strategic priority. Senior sponsors who actually showed up. An embedded August coach in the room.
The model that emerged had a name — PACE — and a rhythm that made it different from any task force or tiger team McCain had run before.
Teams restructured their entire weekly rhythm. Projects that previously took over a year began completing in fourteen weeks. Sponsors saw demos of real work every two weeks instead of status updates every quarter.
But the stronger signal was what happened next: leaders across regions started requesting PACE teams for their own priorities. Demand outpaced supply. The model had pull.
The Scale · Sep 2024 – May 2026
How a four-team pilot became a company-wide capability — built on internal coaches, not more consultants.
September 2024
McCain's leadership commits to a bold experiment: cross-functional pilot teams tackling the company's biggest strategic priorities with a new way of working.
October 2024
Four pilot teams begin their 12-week sprints. Each one is cross-functional, sponsor-backed, and focused on a real strategic priority.
4pilot teams · ~42 people
January 2025
The pilots complete their sprints. Demos to leadership, tangible outcomes, and a proof of concept that holds up. Leaders across regions start asking for teams of their own.
September 2025
Twelve new teams launch simultaneously across North America, Europe, and APMEA. The program goes global.
16total teams · ~120 people
January 2026
A second cohort brings the total to 22 teams and 170+ people. PACE isn't a pilot anymore — it's becoming infrastructure.
22teams · 170+ people
May 2026
Alongside the PACE teams, August trained 356 more McCainers across 20 sessions in five regions. Every SLT member is now building PACE teams into their F27 plans. August's core team throughout: three people.
556+people practicing the new way of working
After leading his own team, one PACE alumnus went on to charter, lead, and coach new teams at three additional sites — while bringing the practices into his everyday meetings. The model spreading on its own.
An alumnus in Global Snacking championed a new PACE team — with its own budget, from a different part of the organization. Organic demand is the clearest proof the way of working is real.
Three things surfaced across every team.
Demo meetings changed how people seek alignment. Instead of working in isolation and presenting finished work for sign-off, teams started sharing rough work early and iterating in the open. The practices that enabled it — Shoddy First Drafts, Safe to Try, the weekly Action / Collaboration / Demo cadence — made progress, not polish, the default.
"We stopped working in the dark and waiting to be told we were right. Now we put something rough in front of people and get better, faster."
This was the single finding above all others. Teams with skilled coaches made decisions faster, stayed focused, and pushed through discomfort. Teams that tried to sustain the practices without a coach found the effect fading. The coach is what makes the way of working real.
PACE work arrives on top of existing responsibilities. When a participant's direct manager isn't the PACE sponsor, they have no visibility into the work. The practices exist — but people need coaching, community, and visible leadership to sustain them.
Practitioners aren't asking for more content or training. They're asking for organizational infrastructure: coaches to guide them, a community to learn with, and leaders who practice what they ask. That's the difference between a transformation that ends and a capability that compounds.
The McCain story is the most recent and most fully documented. But the model — embed with teams, coach in the flow of real work, build internal capability, hand off ownership — has been validated across industries, scales, and cultures over more than a decade.
August designed "Responsive Working" inside PepsiCo's North America Beverages division in 2014: five pilot teams, sprint-based cadence, safe-to-try decisions, embedded coaching. When PepsiCo UK adopted the model facing three straight years of revenue decline, it reversed the decline within eight weeks of launching its first team — +2.3% year one, +2% year two.
It scaled to 60 markets and 10,000+ employees, with an internal coaching network and global Center of Excellence built and handed off.
August partnered with Colgate's Global Change and Org Design function to embed agile habits — rounds, retrospectives, consent-based decision-making — into real work across the organization. Then we stepped back.
120+ teams through the program. 150+ internal coaches and experts trained. 50+ corporate priorities supported. Colgate owns and runs the capability independently. That's the point.
Three engagements across Pharma Supply Chain, Consumer Health, and US Pharma Logistics — each addressing the same root problem: a consensus-driven culture slowing critical decisions in a company that needed to move faster.
A US Pharma Logistics team analyzed and implemented a distribution center shift in seven days versus the typical month-plus — cutting fulfillment risk by at least half. What made it work: decision-rights clarity ("safe to try"), team-level coaching, and practices designed for the constraints of regulated environments.
August doesn't sell a framework. We embed with your teams, coach them through the transition, build the internal capability to sustain it, and leave you with a system you own.
The model works because it changes what people do on Monday morning — not what they say they believe in on Friday afternoon.
If you're evaluating partners for team effectiveness work, we'd welcome the chance to show you what this looks like in practice.