David Rogers wrote the first book on digital transformation. He returns to The Innovation Show to unpack the AI value gap, drawing on a Harvard Business Review article he co-wrote with Krishnan Sankaranarayanan, who leads AI transformation at Eastman. When AI fails to show up in the financial results, David traces the shortfall to strategy, and he shows leaders how to fix it.

In this conversation, David Rogers reveals: • Why one minute saved by AI vanishes in one company and transforms another • The AI value equation, and why its three factors multiply • Why handing AI to a team with no P&L ownership kills the return • The "magic wand" myth that frontier labs sell to executives • How AI drones cut plant downtime by 30 to 40 percent in oil and gas • Why Netflix points its AI at customer retention instead of acquisition • How two chemical companies in the same industry need completely different AI bets • The one discipline to apply before you start any AI pilot

Chapters 00:00 What is a value driver? 01:45 Why AI fails to show up in financial results 03:00 The AI value gap and the awkward CFO conversation 08:10 Why one minute saved can vanish or transform a business 12:30 The AI value equation 15:00 Four reasons companies skip strategic alignment 23:40 Step one, define your value drivers 27:10 Step two, know where you sit in the value chain 30:30 Step three, trace opportunities to the income statement 33:00 Step four, decide how you will measure financial return 34:40 Listener question on AI adoption and organisational change 37:40 Strategy is your moat 39:00 David's next book on transformation in the AI era

Resources The AI Value Gap Is a Strategy Problem: https://davidrogersdigital.substack.com/p/the-ai-value-gap-is-a-strategy-problem Harvard Business Review article: https://bit.ly/HBR-Value-Gap-SS David's website: https://davidrogers.digital David's books: https://www.amazon.ie/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ADavid%2BL.%2BRogers

More from David Rogers on The Innovation Show The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efliq61GF9M The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 2: https://youtu.be/Wd5Av-8ME6Y Digital Transformation Playbook (10 Years On): https://youtu.be/z7eNk-J0KV0

About David Rogers David Rogers is a globally recognised authority on digital transformation and a longtime faculty member at Columbia Business School. He is the author of The Digital Transformation Roadmap, The Digital Transformation Playbook and The Network Is Your Customer.

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Alexander Osterwalder returns to The Innovation Show with a world first. The co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas shares the Value Stack, a brand new tool built on six patterns of value creation. Strategyzer has stopped writing books. Alex explains why the team has moved to applied playbooks, and how the patterns help any team articulate its value proposition and then test which benefit matters most to customers.

What Alex shares in this episode - Why Nintendo won a huge new market with an inferior console - How Henry Ford turned a handcrafted luxury into a car his own factory workers could buy - Why trust was a feature for Airbnb and the entire proposition for FedEx overnight - How Google Ads rescued advertisers from wasting half their budget - Why Salesforce Trailblazers prove identity builders work in B2B, well beyond Harley-Davidson - How Diners Club invented the credit card proposition from nothing - Why Amazon Web Services scores on two patterns at once - Why Strategyzer swapped dense books for playbooks

Chapters 00:00 Wii Ease Booster Hook 00:41 Sponsor Kyndryl 01:18 Guest Intro Value Stack 02:18 From Books to Playbooks 02:56 Six Value Patterns Overview 04:18 Ease Boosters Nintendo Wii 05:54 Access Boosters Ford Model T 06:48 Confidence Builders Trust 07:38 Value Catalysts Google Ads 08:20 Identity Builders Communities 08:54 Market Shapers Credit Cards 09:57 Playbook Demo and Discount 10:43 Giveaway and Where to Find 12:00 Events Closing Thanks 12:40 Sponsor Outro Kyndryl

Get 20% off Strategyzer playbooks at https://www.strategyzer.com with the code INNOVATIONSHOW20.

Win a digital copy of The Invincible Company. Name the gentleman on Alex's slide (he co-authored one of Alex's first books) by replying to the Thursday Thought, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Alex joins Aidan in Dublin on 1 and 2 December for Enterprise Ireland client sessions. Looking for a keynote speaker on innovation or change in Ireland that week? Get in touch at https://theinnovationshow.io

About the Guest Alexander Osterwalder is the co-founder of Strategyzer and the inventor of the Business Model Canvas. He is lead author of Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design and The Invincible Company. https://www.strategyzer.com

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Alex Osterwalder, co-founder of Strategyzer and inventor of the Business Model Canvas, returns to The Innovation Show with a field report on AI value proposition design. A few weeks ago he argued that AI should never replace the human struggle of value proposition work. Drawing on recent work with a large client's product owners and product managers, he now shows Aidan McCullen where AI earns its place, once a team has done the homework that gives a language model something worth working with.

In this conversation, Alex reveals: - The four evidence-backed artifacts every team needs before AI writes a word of its value proposition - Why high-level input to an LLM produces high-level output, and how to stop it - How Strategyzer fed its own customer profiles and value stacks into AI and was surprised by the hero copy that came back - The Value Stack, a new tool that sorts benefits into a key value driver, supporting benefits and table stakes - What Gmail's one gigabyte of free storage in 2004 teaches about the single benefit that brings customers to you - Why a large European marketing team demoted its own "differentiators" to table stakes the first time it used the Value Stack - How the marketer's job shifts towards overseeing AI, much as software developers now oversee coding agents - Why agents can run 100 customer interviews in an hour yet still cannot decide what to build - The reason Alex says AI has no taste, and what that means for product judgment

Chapters: 00:00 Sponsor Message 00:22 Why AI For Value Props 01:44 Field Insights And Demand 03:26 Homework Before AI 04:43 Four Core Artifacts 06:33 Generating Assets With AI 08:10 Marketers As Overseers 10:01 Value Stack Explained 15:15 Agents And Human Judgment 17:41 Wrap Up And Giveaway 18:55 Sponsor Closing Notes

About Alex Osterwalder: CEO and Founder of Strategyzer, inventor of the Business Model Canvas, and lead author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. Explore his tools at https://www.strategyzer.com. And I am biased but a damn good guy!

Win a digital copy of Value Proposition Design, with thanks to Kyndryl. Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack to enter: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Get 20% off the Strategyzer platform with code INNOVATIONSHOW20 at https://www.strategyzer.com

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes, with conversations on disruption, innovation, change, transformation, leadership and AI.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Strategy is Destiny and Inside Corporate Innovation, returns to The Innovation Show to discuss how companies renew themselves from the middle. His new paper with Sasanka Sekhar Chanda revisits three Intel decisions through James March's model of exploration and exploitation. Top management keeps backing an autonomous initiative while it teaches the company something new, and support stops when the learning stops.

In this conversation, Robert reveals: - The fab capacity rule that moved Intel from memory chips into microprocessors years before top management recognised the shift - Why a margin rule told him more about Intel's culture than any values statement, and how the same logic cost Intel the iPhone chip - How Andy Grove spent $750 million on ProShare video conferencing, a business that never passed about $30 million - Why Intel's own people called its RISC processor a YARP, years before ARM made the architecture dominant in mobile - The Grove line that sank Intel's networking pitch - Why the burden of proof always sits with the innovator - The people map that helped build Nike's women's business, and why Infosys Consulting needed one - How to spot a strategic inflection point by watching the rate of change in growth - What a 3M executive told him about the famous 15% time - Why the parking lot on Friday nights and Saturday mornings reveals your real innovators

Chapters: 00:00 Growth Problems Insight 01:18 Culture Money Promotions 02:31 Intel Weeds Seeds Setup 05:12 Three Intel Cases 10:02 Cognitive Rules ProShare 20:43 Define Autonomous Strategy 30:26 Intel Capacity Rule Shift 39:22 Strategic Context Battle 47:25 People Mapping Politics 53:58 Signals Inflection Derivative 57:00 Encouraging Autonomy 3M 01:02:46 Tragic Heroes Conclusion 01:05:16 Where To Find Paper

Read the paper (Stanford GSB working paper): https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/autonomous-strategic-behavior-organizational-learning-top Robert Burgelman at Stanford GSB: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/robert-burgelman

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes, with conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

David Bland, founder of Precoil and lead author of Testing Business Ideas with Alex Osterwalder, helped DuPont and its semiconductor spin-off Qnity build an experimentation capability that surfaces risk early and speeds up commit, correct and cut decisions. The work contributed to a 2026 IRI Innovation Excellence Award for Outstanding Innovative Culture. Across 35 real growth opportunities, DuPont saved over $12M by stopping weak projects and has so far generated about $24M from the ideas that passed their tests.

In this conversation, David reveals: - How DuPont saved over $12M by stopping projects early, and earned about $24M from the ones that survived - Why David opens and closes his keynotes with his own bad calls, including a kitty litter brand later sold for a billion dollars - Why a leader should never facilitate their own team's assumptions mapping session - How the assumptions map changed its labels three times before a whiteboard session with Alex Osterwalder at Stanford - Why most business plans amount to "creative fiction in Excel" - The leadership whiplash that drags companies between Six Sigma efficiency and innovation drives - Dead Projects Day, the Halloween event where DuPont leaders dressed up to explain the projects they killed - Why sales and legal belong in the room before the first experiment runs - How to use AI as a sparring partner while keeping your critical thinking

Chapters: 00:00 AI As Sparring Partner 00:53 Innovation Leaders And Whiplash 04:00 Meet David Bland 09:47 Productive Failure And Assumptions 15:12 Leadership Swings And Efficiency 17:36 DuPont Case Study Origins 21:53 Big Bets And HIPPO Dynamics 23:48 Facilitating Assumptions Mapping 29:45 Evidence Labels Evolve 31:59 Business Plans Are Hallucinations 34:53 DuPont Derisking Results 39:20 Making Change Stick In DNA 42:28 How DuPont Built Capability 47:49 Socialise Wins And Kills 50:50 Bring Sales And Legal Early 52:56 Where To Find David Bland

Find David Bland at https://www.precoil.com and https://davidjbland.com Read the DuPont case study: https://www.precoil.com/articles/case-study-dupont

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Testing Business Ideas, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes, with conversations on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Only twelve companies have ever been worth more than a trillion dollars. Ten of them are American. Eight of those ten were started fractionally, by people who were still in a job or still in school when they built the first version.

Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC in the Bay Area, where she has made over 150 early-stage investments across a decade, with around a dozen exits through IPO and acquisition by Fortune 50 companies. She was one of the earliest investors in Instacart and has sold companies to Goldman Sachs, Ford and Caterpillar. She also teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and writes the Monthly Note. She joins Aidan McCullen to explain fractional founders, the people who de-risk an idea before they ever hand in their notice.

In this conversation, Shuo reveals: - Why 8 of the 10 American trillion-dollar companies were built fractionally, and 1 in 4 of the Fortune 500 too - The Salesforce story most people get wrong: Larry Ellison wrote Marc Benioff a cheque to go and compete - How Jensen Huang and his co-founders designed NVIDIA after work, while still employed in semiconductors - Why "the organism rejects the organ" explains almost every intrapreneur who ends up leaving - What frontier firms actually are, and why giving staff access to AI tools now counts for nothing - Why revenue per employee has become the number startups check before every single hire - The human-to-agent leverage ratio, and why this is the last generation of leaders who manage only people - How Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy revealed that decades of internal data was its most valuable asset - Why 95% of the world's data sits inside private enterprise databases, and why that is gold to AI labs

Chapters: 00:00 Fractional Founder Myth 03:04 Meet Shuo Chen 05:12 Why Founders Side Hustle 08:28 Proof From Trillion Firms 10:15 Keeping Intrapreneurs Close 13:15 Frontier Firms Defined 15:53 Revenue Per Employee Era 22:22 Advice For Students 28:58 AI Writing And Learning 34:58 Spirit Airlines Data Gold 41:20 Tool Spotlight Woolf 47:12 Wrap Up And Links

About Shuo Chen: Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, an early-stage venture firm investing in the future of work, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Read her Monthly Note at https://shuo.iovc.io and connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuo-c

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for the weekly essay behind the show: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Paul Nunes, co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption and Pivot to the Future, returns to talk to Aidan McCullen about the companies that come back from the dead. Motorola is the case study, combinatorial innovation is the engine, and the uncomfortable question underneath it all is what your company would actually be worth in pieces.

In this conversation, Paul reveals: → What a Lazarus taxon is, and why a handful of companies reappear decades after everyone wrote them off → How Motorola collapsed, sold to Google largely for its patents, and found a second life under Lenovo → Why a drone is really a phone camera, a gyroscope and some software, and what that means for your R&D budget → The $180 to $200 phone strategy that won the markets Apple and Samsung were not designing for → Why Kodak kept making billions long after everyone declared it dead → The million-dollar Porsche nobody could restore, and why somebody bought it anyway → Why Shockley Semiconductor should be a household name, and what the Traitorous Eight really cost it → Why putting your name on a stadium or a football shirt may be the first signal of decline → The line every chief strategy officer eventually says: it wasn't that we didn't know what to do, we no longer had the people to do it → Why the man who built the Learjet also built the car radio that became Motorola → Why price deflation, not competition, may be the fundamental strategy problem of the next decade

00:00 Innovation And Downfall 01:13 Sponsor And Guest Intro 02:18 Lazarus Companies Explained 05:54 Motorola Rebirth Story 07:30 Combinatorial Innovation Basics 14:41 Modularity And Supplier Innovation 19:18 Partners Turn Competitors 24:33 Motorola And Nonconsumers 27:56 IP And Hidden Value 34:57 Vanity Marketing Signals 39:32 Talent Curves And Seed Corn 44:44 Deflation And Strategy Pressure 48:01 Closing Thoughts And Wrap

About Paul Nunes Paul F. Nunes is co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption, Pivot to the Future and Mass Affluence, and spent years as Global Managing Director of Research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. His research on growth, disruption and reinvention has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

Find Paul Nunes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-nunes-5351773/

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of one of Paul's books, with thanks to Kyndryl.

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Connect: 🌐 https://theinnovationshow.io 📨 Substack (Thursday Thought): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

#Innovation #PaulNunes #CombinatorialInnovation #JumpingTheSCurve #Motorola #Disruption #Leadership #Strategy #Modularity #Podcast #AidanMcCullen #TheInnovationShow #Thinkers50 #Reinvention

Dov Baron, five-time Top 30 Global Leadership Guru and author of The Art of Belonging, sits down with Aidan McCullen in Vancouver to explain why identity addiction is the hidden reason behavioural change fails — in athletes, in leaders and in entire organisations. From a childhood of poverty in Salford to a 1990 free-climbing fall near Whistler in which he died five times, Dov traces how identity forms, why we get neurochemically hooked on it, and what it takes to build a culture where people belong rather than fit in.

In this conversation, Dov reveals:

• The five levels of the emotional source code — and why most behavioural change fails at the identity level
• What identity addiction is, and why a retired Olympian, a triple-bypass survivor and a burnt-out CEO all suffer from the same thing
• How a 120-foot fall, ten reconstructive surgeries and a dead cat on the couch forced Dov to choose between three lives
• Why "success creates atrophy" and real innovation only happens when things are hard
• The one-day-a-month experiment that gets people wanting to come back to the office
• Why the Great Resignation and COVID's "great pause" were a crisis of meaning, not pay
• Why a boss's sideways look is enough to kill an idea — and what psychological safety really means
• Why the superstar responsible for 40% of your sales may be costing you money
• The "when you did X, I felt Y" exercise that turns conflict into connection

00:00 Belonging Over Fitting In 02:03 Meet Dov Baron 02:28 Early Life And Spiritual Roots 04:50 From Therapy To Source Code 08:46 Identity Addiction Explained 12:37 Near Death Wake Up Call 17:17 Cat Moment And Purpose 23:19 Parallel Dave And Choices 26:03 Pain Drives Change 35:50 Innovation Needs Discomfort 37:51 Building Workplace Community 39:21 Great Resignation Meaning Crisis 41:25 Meaning Over Metrics 42:41 AI And Human Work 44:59 Practice Not Luck 49:33 Psychological Safety 55:10 Lenses And Belonging 01:00:01 Leaders In Transition 01:01:09 Toxic Stars And Meaning 01:09:31 Conflict As Connection 01:18:23 Closing And Sponsor

About Dov Baron: keynote speaker, five-time Top 30 Global Leadership Guru, twice named to Inc. Magazine's Top 100 Leadership Speakers, creator of the Emotional Source Code framework and author of The Art of Belonging: How Conformity Silences Genius and How to Unleash It. Find the book and the Cultures of Belonging course at https://dovbaron.com

About the host: Aidan McCullen is a 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com and https://www.kyndryl.com/institute

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Belonging, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

In Part 3 of The Innovation Show's Strategyzer series, Alex Osterwalder returns to tackle the problem every leadership team quietly struggles with: the core business kills everything that looks different. Building on James March's exploration vs exploitation, Tushman and O'Reilly's Lead and Disrupt, and Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, Alex explains why good people with no ill intent still strangle new products, new channels and new business models — and what leaders must do about it.

In this conversation, Alex reveals:

→ Why the core business kills everything that looks different — and why nobody involved is acting in bad faith → The SonoSite story: why a CEO sat in a sales meeting and watched his top salesperson never take out the product customers were asking for → Why exploration is a top-down challenge — and why bottom-up passion isn't enough without the right governance → How Logitech's Bracken Darrell used "trees, plants and seeds" to proactively shift 70% of resources out of the core → Why Jeff Bezos was obsessed with Amazon dying while it was at the very top — and what Day One culture really protects → The "Rita McGrath test": what a CEO's agenda reveals about what a company actually values → What Alex told a bank CEO about exploration: "I don't even care what you do, as long as people think you're working on it" → Inside the workshop Alex is designing for a luxury hotel chain — mapping city hotels, beach resorts, island retreats, yachts and private jets on a business model portfolio → Why luxury hospitality's shift from lodging to experiences is an exploration problem, not an operations problem → Hubert Joly on Best Buy: when a turnaround must come before exploration — and why everyone else should start exploring today

00:00 Why Innovation Stalls 00:47 Sponsor Message 01:19 Explore Versus Exploit 02:46 Osterwalder Law Returns 05:52 Sales Incentives Trap 09:15 Seeds Plants Trees 12:23 Governance In Practice 15:29 Luxury Hotel Workshop 18:29 Portfolio Map Exercise 24:46 Tools And Playbooks 26:11 Wrap Up And Sponsor

Find the business model portfolio map and many more free tools at https://www.strategyzer.com — Innovation Show listeners get 20% off the paid playbook library with code INNOVATIONSHOW20.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com/institute.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win one of Alex Osterwalder's books, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Alexander Osterwalder, co-author of Value Proposition Design and founder of Strategyzer, returns for Part 2 of our series. Last week: which projects to retire. This week: value proposition design in the age of AI — why generative AI can formulate a brilliant value proposition, but only if you've done the homework it cannot do for you.

In this conversation, Alex reveals:

• Why building fast with AI without validated customer jobs, pains and gains is "running up a hundred wrong hills"
• The four foundations of an irresistible value proposition — and why even world-class brands can't show quantitative evidence for the first one
• Why teams differentiate against competitors instead of through the customer's eyes
• The Value Stack, Strategyzer's new tool for prioritising the benefits customers actually care about
• Should you feed your secret formula into enterprise AI? Alex's two answers to the data-privacy dilemma
• Why the fear of AI handing your value proposition to competitors is — for now — irrational
• Why marketing teams "shouldn't be writing a word" — and how to turn Gen AI into rocket fuel instead of a shortcut
• The B2B trap: designing for users when decision-makers sign the cheque
• How a solo inventor should ABC-test differentiators and pricing with three landing pages
• The Roger Federer analogy: why e-learning alone will never make you world-class
• Why growth is a profession you learn, not a creative gift

00:00 Building Fast Up the Wrong Hill

00:25 Validate Customers with Evidence

01:07 A Word from Our Sponsor, Kyndryl

01:45 How Teams Misuse AI in Value Proposition Design

02:59 Why a Value Proposition Is Not a Writing Exercise

03:55 The Four Ingredients of an Irresistible Value Proposition

05:59 Benefits Backed by Proof

06:50 Differentiate Through the Customer's Eyes

07:58 The Process and the Playbook

10:06 AI Only Works After the Homework

11:55 The Data Privacy Dilemma

13:04 Safe Models and Why Your Value Proposition Is Unique

16:41 Stop Wordsmithing, Start Iterating

17:05 The Gen AI Playbook, Step by Step

18:58 Inside the Playbook Library

19:52 B2B: Users vs Decision-Makers

22:05 Listener Discount and Webinar Details

23:07 Advice for Builders and Entrepreneurs

26:11 Discipline Beats Creativity

27:02 The Roger Federer Coach Analogy

30:07 The Party Trick: Evaluating Business Ideas

31:51 Wrap Up and Thanks to Kyndryl

Explore the Strategyzer playbook library at https://www.strategyzer.com — Innovation Show listeners get 20% off with the code INNOVATIONSHOW20.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Sign up for the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com/institute and send us a screenshot for a chance to win a copy of Value Proposition Design, with thanks to Kyndryl.

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Substack (Thursday Thought): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Alexander Osterwalder, creator of the Business Model Canvas, CEO of Strategyzer and author of The Invincible Company, Testing Business Ideas and Value Proposition Design, returns to The Innovation Show. He walks Aidan McCullen through the evidence-based innovation playbook he uses with companies like Honeywell to decide which growth projects to fund, which to change, and which to retire — so you get a real funnel, not a tunnel.

In this conversation, Alex reveals: • Why every upfront business case is "pure fantasy" — and what to measure instead • The five levels of evidence, from what customers say to what they actually do • How Honeywell's Growth Symposiums fund projects on scorecards of evidence, not opinions • Why LEGO Movies started at zero on every score while LEGO Friends started at level-five feasibility • The explore vs exploit trap: why 90% of companies judge new ideas with "exploit glasses" on • Amazon's scale from new warehouses to Kindle to AWS — and why AWS was never a business case • Why engineers build too fast in the age of AI, and why needs and willingness to pay come first • The "Mark said we know" technique that makes faith-based investing explicit • What makes an entrepreneurial leader, from Jeff Bezos to Logitech's Bracken Darrell • The move from books to playbooks: the say-do cycle and the market-readiness assessment, demonstrated live

Chapters: 00:00 Scorecard Of Evidence 02:00 Oscar The Cat 03:00 Welcoming Alex Osterwalder 04:00 From Books To Playbooks 06:00 Honeywell Growth Symposiums 08:00 Business Cases Are Fantasy 10:00 Test Needs And Willingness To Pay 13:00 Five Levels Of Evidence 16:00 Evidence Scorecards Per Idea 17:00 LEGO Movies Versus LEGO Friends 20:00 Explore Versus Exploit Mindset 24:00 The Dual Mindset Leader 27:00 Innovation Theatre Confession 30:00 Playbook Demo Market Readiness 32:38 Scoring Customer Evidence 34:09 Leader Evidence Conversations 36:19 Practical Wrap Up 39:00 Where To Find Alex

Find Alex and the Strategyzer playbook library at https://www.strategyzer.com

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Win a copy of one of Alex Osterwalder's books: sign up for the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com/institute and send us a screenshot to be in with a chance, with thanks to Kyndryl.

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Substack (Thursday Thought): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, creator of the project economy concept and author of Powered by Projects, joins Aidan McCullen to explain why agile — a 20-year-old idea — is no longer enough, and why the next evolution is the project-driven organization (PDO): a company rearchitected around dynamic, empowered, cross-functional project teams.

In this conversation, Antonio reveals:

• Why EY's Project Everest collapsed despite a perfect plan — and what it says about ego at the top
• The structural blind spot that undermined Nike's digital transformation
• The robot hairdresser that shocked a luxury company's C-suite — and why "safe" jobs aren't
• Why COVID briefly turned every surviving company into a project-driven organization
• How Bill Anderson is dismantling hierarchy and approval steps at Bayer
• The insurance company that ring-fenced €50 million for crazy ideas — and why employees only asked for €2 million
• The bank that had Revolut's idea first, then killed it in the budgeting cycle
• Why "are you crazy?" is the best compliment an idea can receive
• The Toyota-style kill switch every transformation needs — and why 90% done is done
• How Alan Mulally's all-green KPIs at Ford exposed a culture that couldn't ask for help

Chapters:

Find Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez at https://antonionietorodriguez.com and on LinkedIn.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Powered by Projects, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Rita McGrath wrote The End of Competitive Advantage and gave us transient advantage. Sangeet Paul Choudary wrote Reshuffle and won the 2025 Thinkers50 Strategy Award. Aidan McCullen puts them in the same room to ask a question neither can answer alone: in an age of AI, is advantage getting shorter, or are a small number of firms locking in something far more durable by making the rules everyone else has to play by?

In this conversation, Rita and Sangeet reveal:

• Why the two founding assumptions of strategy — that industries have boundaries, and that equilibrium is normal — are now absurd
• What Carlota Perez's turning point framework says about where we are, and why data and intelligence are the new oil
• The investor who always bet against Netflix, and the one thing he never believed the film studios would be stupid enough to do
• How Netflix beat Blockbuster before streaming existed, by serving local demand with national supply
• Why Tesla went vertically integrated in the decade everyone else preached openness
• How Reliance Jio commoditised its own cash cow, took 400 million users, and collapsed an industry from 17 players to three
• The difference between a rule maker and a rule taker, and why rule takers are condemned to run from one transient advantage to the next
• Why roughly 93% of corporate assets were tangible in 1975 and almost exactly the reverse is true today
• How Binah.ai deleted the blood draw, the lab, the chemicals and the actuary from life insurance pricing
• Sangeet's test for anyone using AI at work: are you working for the model, or is the model working for you?
• Why translators are now paid half as much to do the harder half of the job
• Rita's SDSS times two: stop doing stupid stuff, then start doing smart stuff

About Rita McGrath Rita McGrath is a longtime professor at Columbia Business School, a Thinkers50 top-ten management thinker and winner of their number one award for strategy. She is the author of The End of Competitive Advantage, Seeing Around Corners, Discovery-Driven Growth, MarketBusters and The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and she hosts the Thought Sparks podcast. https://www.ritamcgrath.com

About Sangeet Paul Choudary Sangeet Paul Choudary is the founder of Platformation Labs and the author of Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy, winner of the 2025 Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He co-authored Platform Revolution and wrote Platform Scale, and his work on platforms has been named by Harvard Business Review as one of the top ten ideas in strategy. https://reshufflebook.com and https://platforms.substack.com

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation, and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Reshuffle, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Keith McCandless, co-developer of Liberating Structures and co-author of The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, joins Aidan McCullen to explain why most meetings are either over-controlled or under-controlled — and how simple shifts in everyday interaction can unleash a culture of innovation from the frontline to the C-suite.

In this conversation, Keith reveals:

• Why the first field test of Liberating Structures happened in hospitals fighting superbugs — with fifteen languages spoken on a single unit
• The Big Five conventional structures (presentation, managed discussion, status report, brainstorm, open discussion) — and why every one of them quietly fails
• How one father went from a year of monosyllabic answers to an hour-long conversation with his teenage daughter using Creative Destruction
• Why 1-2-4-All fixed a two-year meeting nightmare for twenty project managers in Paris in half an hour
• Why repetition is a source of innovation — and how thinking alone first defeats anchoring bias
• The Ecocycle map a healthcare group crumpled, covered in Post-its, and reused every quarter for a year
• The VA hospital leader who declared mid-session, "All the decisions we just made are final"
• Why influencing culture beats changing culture — and what the adjacent possible has to do with it
• How Liberating Structures moved online with nothing more than a tech host and breakout rooms
• The lesson from Dee Hock, the chaordic organisation, and the war language that limits our world

00:00 Sponsor Message 00:27 Liberating Structures Intro 01:27 Messy Work Environments 02:21 Superbugs Field Test 03:35 What Are They 05:02 Complexity Lens 07:52 Influencing Culture 12:31 Adjacent Possible Innovation 14:18 Personal Life Applications 15:59 Creative Destruction TRIZ 19:28 Neurodiversity Inclusion 22:58 Big Five Meeting Traps 30:27 Microstructures Online 32:26 Online Facilitation Tips 36:50 1-2-4-All In Action 42:25 Eco Cycle Strategy Map 47:39 Liberating Leadership 52:45 Wrap Up And Resources 53:54 Sponsor Thanks Outro

Find Keith McCandless at https://www.liberatingstructures.com — the full repertoire, the app (with at least 33 structures on your phone), and the new Liberating Structures Fieldbook, co-authored with Nancy White.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation, and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Usman Sheikh, founder of High Output Ventures and author of the Framebreak newsletter, has spent years writing about how AI will reshape professional services — and the world has now caught up with the puck. In this conversation with Aidan McCullen, he explains why the consulting pyramid — the structure behind every major firm — is coming apart, and what replaces it.

In this conversation, Usman reveals:

• Why firms became pyramids: leverage, margin, and a talent academy paid for by the client's billable hours
• How AI pulls all three apart at once
• What "judgment-shaped artifacts" are — and why AI is fundamentally different from offshoring and RPA
• "Fluent but substitutable": why leaning on an LLM turns your career into a slot machine
• The digital twin trap — why a frozen snapshot of a senior partner decays fast
• The Concentrix vs Sierra story: AI voice agents in regulated industries growing from $100M to $200M in revenue in four months
• The "AI discount": why KPMG asked its own auditor for a price cut — and how the surplus drains to clients and platforms
• Why Palantir and Microsoft are suddenly preaching sovereignty over your data and models
• The intelligence core: the feedback loop that turns pyramids into rings
• How firms build tomorrow's bench — simulators, shadowing, apprenticeships — and why partners near retirement have no incentive to bother

Chapters: 00:00 Sponsor Message 00:31 Guest Introduction 03:10 Why Firms Became Pyramids 05:13 AI Breaks The Model 05:53 Digital Twins And Hiring 07:38 Training Juniors With AI 11:50 Fluent But Substitutable 15:19 Offshoring To AI Shift 20:18 Macro Jobs And Demand 23:14 Who Captures The Gains 28:04 Learning In The AI Era 34:33 Intelligence Core And Rings 40:49 AI Discount And Value Drain 45:21 Building The Future Bench 50:11 Wrap Up And Where To Find 51:16 Final Thanks And Outro

About Usman Sheikh Usman Sheikh is the founder and managing director of High Output Ventures, a venture studio building and backing technology-augmented service firms, and the author of Framebreak, a weekly newsletter on strategy, consulting and the knowledge-work economy.

Read his work at https://framebreak.com and connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/usmans

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, a keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Carla Johnson, author of RE:Think Innovation, is on a mission to teach one million people to consistently come up with new, great and reliable ideas. In this anniversary-edition conversation, she takes Aidan McCullen through her updated Wheel of Innovation — observe, distill, relate, generate, pitch — and the cautionary tales that show why so many good ideas die in the boardroom.

In this conversation, Carla reveals:

• Why a pet-flavoured water startup failed — and the warning signs it ignored
• The "CF-uh-O" who killed a Disney-inspired pitch, and what it teaches about how ideas are packaged
• What brand detachment disorder is — and why "that would never work here" is your most expensive excuse
• How Big Ass Fans transplanted the customer experience of Zingerman's Deli into an industrial fan company
• How the CDC's zombie apocalypse campaign got 60,000 hits in an hour and put Dr. Ali Khan on stage at Comic-Con
• Why Great Ormond Street Hospital brought in Ferrari's Formula 1 pit crew to cut surgical handover errors
• How Tim Washer turned the Cisco ASR 9000 router launch into a Valentine's Day love story
• Why real creativity only starts after your first 200 ideas
• The "how might we" language shift that stops your brain killing ideas before they're born
• How to give feedback that builds perpetual innovators instead of silencing them

Chapters:

00:00 Innovation Is A Process

00:49 Why RE Think Matters

02:10 Thirsty Pet Cautionary Tale

05:01 Defining Innovation Clearly

07:29 New Great Reliable Ideas

09:54 Perpetual Innovators Explained

11:03 Mentorina Pitch Gone Wrong

15:10 Brand Detachment Disorder

18:29 Complexity Bias In Innovation

22:07 Brand Transplant Big Ass Fans

25:38 Constraints And If Onlys

28:23 CDC Zombie Preparedness Win

33:18 Wheel Of Innovation Update

33:53 Constraints Spark Creativity

34:27 Cisco Router Love Story

39:32 Observation Drives Innovation

45:01 Distill Dots Into Patterns

48:05 Relate Ideas To Brand

53:00 Generate 200 Ideas

55:50 Pitch The Idea Journey

59:32 Feedback That Builds

01:04:19 Where To Find Carla

Find Carla Johnson at https://carlajohnson.co — take the innovation archetype assessment and sign up for her fortnightly newsletter.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark, authors of the landmark Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, join Aidan McCullen for an Innovation Show exclusive. Their book is the Rosetta Stone of platform strategy — the mechanic underneath the Innovator's Dilemma — and it has never been more relevant than in this age of AI.

In this conversation, Carliss and Kim reveal:

• Why the power of modularity underpins Moore's Law — and everything digital around us
• How IBM engineers, locked in a Connecticut motel before Christmas, invented the first conscious modular platform strategy
• How the System/360 turned IBM from a competitor into "the environment"
• Why the engineers who walked out of IBM's San Jose plant spawned the entire disk-drive industry
• How IBM owned 30% of Intel and contracted Microsoft — yet failed to own the only two sources of profit in the PC ecosystem
• Why "the game is never incontestably won"
• Why Sears couldn't become Walmart, and Walmart couldn't become Amazon
• The Chevy Vega that shook itself apart on the test track — and the cost of losing tacit knowledge
• Why AI agents are forcing companies to map their workflows for the first time
• How Haier replaced twelve layers of management with 4,000 entrepreneurial teams
• Why leadership is the operating system of the organisation

00:00 Why This Book Matters 00:33 Modularity For Founders Investors 01:39 Meet The Authors 02:25 What Are Design Rules 03:43 Design Rules Everywhere 06:50 Digital Tech Meets Software 10:52 IBM System 360 Breakthrough 14:22 Artifacts And Interfaces 20:55 Ecosystem Value Migration 26:10 Capturing Value In Platforms 30:23 AI And Measuring Modularity 34:08 Architectural Change And Retail 37:37 Why Incumbents Survive Or Die 43:28 Modularity Creates Options 44:48 Incumbents Miss Nuances 47:09 AI Needs Workflow Maps 52:18 Tacit Knowledge Lost 54:13 Small Car Hood Failures 59:00 Why Ideas Bomb 01:01:28 History Constrains Firms 01:05:52 Modular Organisations Rise 01:08:58 Haier Team Ecosystems 01:17:41 Leadership As Operating System 01:21:55 Spandrels And Tech Reality 01:27:53 Closing Reflections

About the Guests Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, at Harvard Business School and author of Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations (MIT Press). Kim B. Clark is a former Dean of Harvard Business School, NAC Distinguished Professor of Management at BYU Marriott School of Business, co-author of Leading Through, and co-founder of the Leading Through Institute. Together they wrote Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity (MIT Press). Design Rules, Volume 2: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049337/design-rules-volume-2/ Leading Through Institute: https://leadingthrough.co

About the Host Aidan McCullen is a 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). More at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Connect: https://theinnovationshow.io https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

About 2% of people are narcissists. Among CEOs, it's roughly 16%. Jennifer Chatman — Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading scholars of organisational culture — joins Aidan McCullen to explain why narcissistic leadership is so often mistaken for visionary leadership, and how to tell the two apart before one wrecks your company.

Drawing on her widely cited article with Stanford's Charles O'Reilly, "Transformational Leader or Narcissist?", and her new book Making Organizational Culture Great, Jennifer separates the grandiose vision we admire from the exploitation that comes attached to it. This episode follows directly on from the two-part Geoffrey Cain series on Steve Jobs in exile — because Jobs is one of the case studies.

In this conversation, Jennifer reveals:

• Why a narcissistic CEO's pay quietly pulls away from their team's over time — and what that gap really measures
• The single interview question that exposes a narcissist: "Who did you bring along with you?"
• Why Steve Jobs ended his career with 13 senior leaders who'd stayed 13 years — and what that says about him
• How "grandiose vision" and "narcissism" overlap on a Venn diagram — and where they split
• The "dark triad" that turns confidence into damage: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism
• Why narcissistic CEOs file far more lawsuits — yet win no more of them
• The counter-intuitive team move: group your narcissists together
• Why narcissism's damage to a culture is "sticky" — it lingers long after the leader leaves
• How to shield yourself when you can't leave — and when to look for the exit
• Why chaos and uncertainty are a narcissist's favourite weather

Chapters 00:00 Cold open: how narcissist CEOs pull away from their teams 02:00 Welcome Jennifer Chatman, and the Steve Jobs connection 04:00 Kalanick, Holmes, Trump: the quotes that give a narcissist away 05:00 Why 16% of CEOs are narcissists — and how they draw you in 07:00 The delayed damage: pay, credit, and the dark triad 16:00 The one question that exposes a narcissist 19:00 Risk, lawsuits, and the denial of failure 24:00 Ethics, collaboration, and the sticky cost to culture 27:00 How to protect yourself, and Making Organizational Culture Great

(Timestamps follow the transcript markers — shift after the final edit.)

About the Host Aidan McCullen, 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI/disruption/innovation/change, host of The Innovation Show, author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Links: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

About the Guest Jennifer A. Chatman is the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a leading scholar of organisational culture and narcissistic leadership. She co-created the Organizational Culture Profile and co-hosts the podcast The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer. With Stanford's Charles O'Reilly she wrote the widely cited article "Transformational Leader or Narcissist? How Grandiose Narcissists Can Create and Destroy Organizations and Institutions," and with Glenn Carroll she is the author of Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2026). Link: https://www.jenniferachatman.com

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Host Aidan McCullen sits down with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, transformation, leadership, AI and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Making Organizational Culture Great, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Connect: Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Substack (Thursday Thought): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Author Geoffrey Cain joins Aidan McCullen for part two on Steve Jobs in Exile, the story of the wilderness years between Jobs' 1985 ousting from Apple and his return. Cain reframes the NeXT era not as a triumphant hero's journey but as a cascade of failure, ego and self-sabotage that quietly forged the leader Jobs became.

In this conversation, Geoffrey reveals:

• Why the "reality distortion field" stopped working the moment the $6,500 NeXTcube shipped
• How Jobs sabotaged an IBM deal that could have made NeXTSTEP, not Windows, the world's operating system
• The airport moment he abandoned his own salesman in front of 800 IBM engineers
• Why he killed Ross Perot's pipeline to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon with five words: "I don't like the feds"
• How a Daffy Duck demo blew up a Disney deal worth thousands of computers
• Why Tim Berners-Lee built the entire World Wide Web on a single NeXTcube in 1990
• How the creators of Doom were turned away because Jobs "didn't like games"
• The advisor's warning Jobs ignored for a decade: "your assets have feet"
• Why putting on a grey suit to sell enterprise software was the moment he finally grew up
• The random mid-level phone call — not Jobs' idea — that put him back on the road to Apple

Chapters: 00:00 Think beyond use cases 00:38 Sponsor message 01:03 Part two begins 01:54 NeXT revenge era 03:48 Reality distorts back 04:56 Cube launch hype 05:59 Sales reality check 06:48 Founder market lesson 08:04 The hero–shithead rollercoaster 12:09 Carrot and stick leadership 13:25 Assets have feet 14:57 Co-founders depart 17:50 Buggy cube problems 18:53 Writing the donut hole 19:57 Canon investment drama 21:33 IBM deal sabotage 25:40 Ross Perot fallout 28:13 No feds market 28:48 Disney deal blow-up 31:03 NeXT powers the web 32:32 Doom and missed gaming 33:28 Lesson for AI builders 35:32 Motorola dumps NeXT 38:40 Rock bottom pivot 40:07 Enterprise sales Jobs 43:34 WebObjects breakthrough 48:06 Pixar vindication 51:05 Phone call to Apple 54:47 Wrap up and sponsor

About Geoffrey Cain: Geoffrey Cain is an author and investigative journalist. His book Steve Jobs in Exile chronicles the NeXT and Pixar years, and he also wrote Samsung Rising. Website: https://geoffreycain.net Substack (The Burner Files): https://geoffreycain.substack.com X: https://x.com/Geoffrey_Cain

About The Innovation Show: The Innovation Show is the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Host Aidan McCullen sits down with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, leadership, AI and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for extra content and webinars.

Connect: Website: https://theinnovationshow.io Substack: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

About the Author Geoffrey Cain is an author and investigative journalist, and the author of Steve Jobs in Exile and Samsung Rising. https://geoffreycain.net — https://geoffreycain.substack.com

About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation, and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

Award-winning journalist Geoffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of a Technology Visionary, joins Aidan McCullen to tell the story the official Jobs narrative leaves out: the dozen years between his firing from Apple in 1985 and his triumphant return. Drawing on unbroadcast NeXT footage, new interviews and internal documents, Cain reveals the failures, the revenge and the near-misses that forged the leader who saved Apple.

In this conversation, Geoffrey reveals:

• Why Steve Jobs was three years from bankruptcy in the early 1990s
• The "low-level employees" lie that made Apple sue its own co-founder
• Why the lawsuit backfired and handed Jobs exactly what he wanted
• How a Bill Gates talk about CD-ROMs accidentally named NeXT
• Why revenge on John Sculley — not changing the world — drove the founding of NeXT
• The "hero–shithead rollercoaster" every NeXT executive insisted Cain had to understand
• The "deep shit list" Jobs ran the company on — and the mindset shift that replaced it
• How George Lucas's divorce handed Jobs Pixar at a fire-sale price
• Why Ross Perot bet $20 million on a company with no product
• "Steve on a Stick" — the celebrity sales act that kept NeXT alive

Chapters:

00:00 Failures Before Fame

01:03 Sponsor Message

01:36 NeXT Years Overview

02:50 Meet Geoffrey Cain

06:46 Survivorship Bias Lens

08:59 Near Bankruptcy Stakes

11:50 Fired From Apple 1985

14:37 Summer In Exile

19:11 Rival Jean-Louis Gassée

22:22 Dan'l Lewin And Education

27:32 Revenge Fuels NeXT

30:52 Apple Sues Steve Jobs

34:37 Lawsuit Backfires

36:23 Naming NeXT

39:02 Betting Careers On Steve

42:08 Pixar Fire Sale Bet

45:28 Working With Steve

46:31 Hero Shithead Rollercoaster

49:11 NeXT Talent Hierarchy

53:14 Luxury Spending Spree

58:32 Ross Perot Big Check

01:02:04 Deep Shit List Management

01:08:28 Canon Optical Disk Gamble

01:13:38 Businessland Sales Fallout

01:17:22 Wrap Up And Sponsor

Find Geoffrey Cain at https://geoffreycain.net, on X at @Geoffrey_Cain and on LinkedIn (GCain).

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Steve Jobs in Exile, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Aidan McCullen hosts world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation, leadership, AI and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation, and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

In this special panel from the Kyndryl Institute and The Innovation Show, host Aidan McCullen brings together four of the world's sharpest minds on strategy, innovation and disruption to explain why most leaders are using AI completely wrong — and what to do instead. Rita McGrath (Columbia, author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset and originator of "transient advantage"), Alexander Osterwalder (creator of the Business Model Canvas, CEO of Strategyzer), Ismail Amla (SVP at Kyndryl, author of From Incremental to Exponential) and Usman Sheikh (author of Frame Break, MD of High Output Ventures) map how work, value and power are being redrawn.

In this conversation, the panel reveals:

• Why painting over a rusty gate explains how most companies are misusing AI
• How a single developer sold an $80 million company to Wix after six months of solo work
• What Jensen Huang does every Sunday night to stay connected to NVIDIA's front line
• Why Bayer put its whole workforce on 90-day cycles — and how it kills office politics
• The "verification bottleneck" that quietly cancels out every speed gain from AI
• Why one firm tracking staff AI logins for promotions missed the point entirely
• How the billable hour is dying — and what replaces it
• Why labour arbitrage flipped from advantage to liability in just twelve months
• What a Korean fintech founded by a dentist (Toss) teaches us about permissionless teams
• Where incumbents still hold a moat that AI-native startups can't touch

Chapters: 00:00 AI Moment Opens

00:35 Meet The Panel

02:20 Rewiring Organisations

03:36 Rusty Gate Lesson

04:25 Entrepreneurial CEO Return

06:28 Permissionless Transition

08:39 One-Person Unicorns

10:13 Power Redefined

13:17 Verification Bottleneck

15:46 Agents In The Enterprise

20:22 Gaming AI Metrics

22:54 Death Of The Billable Hour

24:23 Electricity Era Analogy

26:18 Business Model Fundamentals

28:04 Rethinking Business Models

29:04 AI Native vs Legacy

29:49 Services Industry Upended

33:40 First Steps For Incumbents

37:51 Toss And Team Autonomy

41:17 Incentives And Accountability

45:42 Incumbent Data Moats

47:50 Elevator Pitches And Wrap-Up

The panel: Rita McGrath — https://www.ritamcgrath.com

Alexander Osterwalder / Strategyzer — https://www.strategyzer.com

Ismail Amla, From Incremental to Exponential — https://www.kyndryl.com

Usman Sheikh, Frame Break — https://highoutputventures.com

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack : https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

About The Innovation Show: The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Each week, Aidan McCullen sits down with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners to explore disruption, innovation, change, leadership, AI and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

About the host: Aidan McCullen — 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen

Follow and subscribe:

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

About Eric Ries Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and the bestselling author of The Lean Startup. His new book, Incorruptible, maps the structural forces that destroy company missions and lays out a blueprint for building organisations that resist them. He is also the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE).

About Aidan McCullen Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50-recognised host, keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable, and former professional athlete. He is the founder and host of The Innovation Show — the podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.

In this conversation, Eric reveals:

• Why mission drift and bureaucracy are really corruption — and why naming them that changes everything
• How financial gravity silently pulls every organisation toward value extraction unless actively resisted
• The professor story that launched the book — and the question that haunts every founder: is it even possible to build an incorruptible organisation?
• The LTSE ambush: how Eric's team chose potential bankruptcy over compromising their principles — and why that decision ultimately saved the company
• Why the founder hero story and the market story are the same story told backwards — and how that confusion destroys organisations from the inside
• The golden goose paradox: why Sol Price and Robert Owen kept losing control of the very organisations they built
• The Costco governance fortress — how Jim Sinegal created a structure that protects the fiduciary-to-the-customer ethos no matter how hard Wall Street pushes back

Guest links:

• Book: https://amzn.to/4e89kOx
• More resources: https://www.incorruptible.co/resources/more-failures

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Incorruptible, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Subscribe and follow: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

That was Andy — a top serial innovator at SAIC — telling his manager Dennis what he needed to be protected from. J work, in Andy's field of computational electromagnetics, is the imaginary part of a number. To Andy, it meant the imaginary work: staff meetings, budget reviews, formal reporting. Dennis's job was to keep him in real work. Most managers do the opposite.

In part three of our Serial Innovators series, Bruce Vojak closes the loop. After two episodes on who serial innovators are and how they navigate the politics, this one is about how organisations find them, develop them — and how managers can stop accidentally driving them out the door.

Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (with Ray Price and Abby Griffin), founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering.

In this conversation, Bruce reveals:

• Why mechanistic, CV-screening HR processes — and now AI-powered hiring filters — systematically screen out your future innovators • The four engagement filters that actually identify a serial innovator: how they engage with problems, projects, business, and people • The five core traits — systems thinking, above-average (but not extreme) creativity, innate curiosity, deep-expertise intuition, and the intrinsic drive to make things better • Why π-shaped (pi-shaped) workers — broad across domains AND deep in multiple specialisms — beat T-shaped specialists • Why innovators spot innovators — and why your best HR move is letting your existing serial innovators sit in on hires • The career-phase development model: hard problems early, breadth via exposure, apprenticeship over mentorship, and burnout as a real risk if you don't choose your battles • Golden handcuffs — and the "fur-lined mousetrap" most serial innovators eventually walk into • The Dennis-and-Andy story at DEMACO/SAIC — and what Dennis did right that almost every other manager gets wrong • The pheasant hunting in Iowa metaphor — why over-managed budgets leave no nesting ground for the future of your business • The five things a manager has to do — air cover, patience, running interference, no bureaucratic J work, no daily progress reports • Why phase-gate control is the slow death of breakthrough innovation • Where Bruce respectfully diverges from Clay Christensen on whether innovation can survive inside the organisation — or has to be spun out • The incentive traps that quietly destroy serial innovators — and why "I'm doing what's best for the company and you're giving me crap for it" is the line every serial innovator says to themselves at least once

Chapters: 00:00 Executive Innovator Balance 00:37 Sponsor Message 01:03 Serial Innovators Intro 01:08 HR Screening Problem 03:02 Four Engagement Filters 04:46 Engaging With Problems 05:28 Projects Tenacity 06:29 Business Mindset 07:16 People And Customers 08:33 Research Method War Room 10:46 Five Core Traits 12:12 Innovators Spot Innovators 14:05 Career Phases 0 To 10 17:06 Hard Problems Early 17:58 Apprenticeship Model 18:52 Burnout And Choosing Battles 22:33 Innovator Versus Inventor 24:24 Nurturing Through Exposure 27:05 Budget Barriers Story 29:59 AI Hiring And Hidden Signals 31:44 HR Triads And Policy Limits 33:04 Golden Handcuffs Risk 34:34 Managing For Impact Setup 35:52 Relational Management Style 37:41 Innovation As Dance 38:09 Incentives And Motivation 40:51 Demco SAIC Case Study 44:08 Pheasant Metaphor Budgets 47:12 Avoiding J Work 49:55 Manager Air Cover Tips 52:03 Phase Gates And Control 55:53 Ego And Incentive Traps 59:54 Christensen Inside Vs Spinout 01:03:58 Pi Shaped Innovators 01:08:16 No Excuses Innovation Preview 01:11:33 Wrap Up And Where To Find

About Bruce Vojak Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms. Website: https://breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com Book: Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen — 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable — where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Conversations with the world's leading authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, transformation, leadership, AI, creativity and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

About the host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable (Wiley). Learn more or enquire about booking him for a keynote: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen/

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Follow and listen: Website: https://theinnovationshow.io About the host: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

That was Nancy Dawes' answer when Bruce Vojak asked her how she did it. The chemical engineer who took Olay from a dying brand to a billion-dollar product line wasn't being mysterious — she was telling him she saw patterns no-one else did. And the real burden, she realised, wasn't seeing them. It was getting an entire organisation to see them too.

In part two of our Serial Innovators series, Bruce Vojak returns to unpack the chapter most innovators learn the hard way: the politics. In over 90% of a mature firm, resources, people and management attention are locked onto today's products. Breakthrough innovation has to fight all of it — for capital, for headcount, for strategic oxygen — and that fight is political by design.

Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (with Ray Price and Abby Griffin), founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering.

In this conversation, Bruce reveals:

• The Galileo scenario — why a serial innovator looks at the same data as everyone else and sees a completely different solution
• Why politics loses its negative meaning the moment you realise it is the only way to actually serve the customer
• Strategic coherence vs tactical coherence — and the one question to ask before you push any breakthrough idea into your firm
• "Crossing the bridge" from the naïve view (invention is sufficient, the manager will recognise it) to political pragmatism
• The four elements of trust — competence, reliability, openness, concern — that buy a serial innovator the right to be heard
• Why every breakthrough story Bruce found came from an emergent team, not a pre-formed innovation team
• The "Stone Soup" model of recruiting allies one favour at a time
• The Disneyland queue problem of selling internally — you think you've got buy-in, and then there are ten more people behind the next corner
• Soft influence (planting seeds, telling stories, "people tolerate my conclusions but act on their own conclusions") and hard influence (data, prototypes, signed purchase orders, customer pull-through)
• "The best marketing research is a signed purchase order" — the line Bruce still uses as a filter today
• Buckminster Fuller's outlaw quote, and his trim tab metaphor — how one person, properly placed, can move the whole ship
• Chuck House's HP defiance and the line that captures every serial innovator who ever risked their job for the work: "I wasn't trying to be defiant. I just wanted a success for HP. It never occurred to me it might cost me my job."

00:00 Sponsor Message

00:25 Why Breakthroughs Stall

01:15 Meet Bruce Vojak

02:36 Seeing Hidden Patterns

06:14 Innovation Lenses

09:28 Strategic vs Tactical Coherence

10:37 Reframing Politics

11:57 QWERTY Switching Costs

14:27 Owning the Political Work

18:00 Trust and Early Wins

21:14 Crossing the Bridge

30:04 Convincing Many Stakeholders

31:40 Engaging Allies Slowly

33:01 Emergent Teams Not Assigned

38:21 Innovation as Team Sport

39:10 Positioning for Strategy Fit

43:26 Too Many Innovators

44:38 Proof via Purchase Orders

46:25 Outlaw Area and Trim Tab

50:17 Politics Navigation Diagram

53:15 Manager Perspective Teaser

55:46 Wrap Up and Sponsor

About Bruce Vojak Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms.

Website: https://breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com

Book: Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen — author of Undisruptable, keynote speaker and former pro athlete — where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Conversations with the world's leading authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, transformation, leadership, AI, creativity and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Kyndryl helps leaders harness AI-powered consulting and managed-service capability for smarter decisions, faster innovation and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Follow and listen: Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Bruce Vojak is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (Oxford University Press). In this bonus episode of The Innovation Show, he joins Aidan McCullen for a focused look at the Hourglass Innovation Model — the descriptive framework that maps how serial innovators actually move from an interesting problem to a flawless product launch.

In this conversation, Bruce reveals:

• Why the Hourglass Model is descriptive, not prescriptive — and why that matters
• How serial innovators often redefine the problem before they solve it
• The Tom Osborne story — how reframing a feminine hygiene brief from diaper to garment changed everything
• Why serial innovators can appear completely unproductive for months — and why that is actually the work
• How they were practising customer empathy and design thinking before those ideas had names
• Why Execute — the stage most firms obsess over — is just one of five tasks
• How to use the model as an honest self-diagnostic: am I doing these things, or is it really the organisation?

Chapter topics

00:00 Hourglass Model Intro

00:31 Stage Gate vs Hourglass

01:15 Redefining the Problem

04:16 Pragmatism and Empathy

06:27 Deep Dive Understanding

07:49 Experiment and Iterate

08:39 Nonlinear Flow Explained

10:02 Org Maturity and Politics

11:47 Normalize and Self Assess

12:53 Wrap Up and Sponsor

About The Innovation Show The Innovation Show with Aidan McCullen is the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Conversations with world-class authors, scientists, and practitioners on disruption, innovation, leadership, and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

About Bruce Vojak Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms. Website: https://breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bvojak/

Book: Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms https://amzn.to/4f7Y85q

This episode is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Listen and follow: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

After interviewing more than 50 serial innovators inside the world's largest mature companies, Bruce Vojak knows something most boards don't: a tiny minority of people — roughly 1 in 500 inside a large firm — quietly create the breakthrough products that fund everything else. They have no formal mandate. They are often almost fired. And without them, the S-curve flatlines.

Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (with Ray Price and Abby Griffin), founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and a former engineering executive who has spent over a decade studying how breakthrough innovation actually happens inside big organisations. This is part one of a multi-part series with host Aidan McCullen on Bruce's life's work.

In this conversation, Bruce reveals:

• Why the humble carrot peeler is the clearest example of how innovation redefines the basis of competition
• How Tom Osborne at Procter & Gamble almost lost his job twice — before launching the billion-dollar Always Ultra brand
• The Tom Osborne quote every product team should hang on the wall: his products were "love letters to his customers"
• Why it is not marketing, it is "customering" — and why customer-driven beats market-driven every time
• The three roles inside the stage-gate process — inventor, champion, implementer — and why serial innovators play across all three
• Why stage-gate is brilliant for incremental innovation and lethal for breakthrough work
• The MP5 model: motivation, personality, perspectives, preparation, process and politics — what serial innovators bring vs. what they develop
• Why the politics is the work — and why pushing the boulder up the hill is Sisyphean by design
• The hiring insight that changes everything: "I want people who want to do the work innovators do, not people who want to be an innovator"
• How Iain McGilchrist's master and emissary, Charles Handy's S-curves and Thomas Kuhn's paradigms all converge inside one good innovator
• Why early success is a curse — and what to do when your organisation has forgotten how it found its first product

Chapters:

About Bruce Vojak Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms.

Website: https://breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bvojak/

Book: Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms

https://amzn.to/4f7Y85q

About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen — author of Undisruptable, keynote speaker and former pro athlete — where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Conversations with the world's leading authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, transformation, leadership, AI, creativity and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Follow and listen:

Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Jeff and Staney DeGraff return to The Innovation Show to close out Aidan McCullen's DeGraff trilogy with their book The Art of Change. Their argument is direct: change rarely fails because of bad strategy or weak execution. It fails because leaders bring the wrong mindset — treating change like a linear project when change is actually a paradox to be held.

In this conversation, Jeff and Staney reveal:

• Why the man who saved Operation Warp Speed got passed over for promotion — and what his story tells every innovator about the cost of being right
• The Jonas Salk warning every change-maker should hear: they won't notice, then they'll say you're doing it wrong, then they'll call you unprofessional, then they'll take credit for your work
• Why apathy and alignment are the deadliest signs in any organisation
• The seven core paradoxes of change — and the four-step paradox mindset cycle that breaks the deadlock
• Why facts don't change minds (the Harriet Beecher Stowe story Lincoln told to prove it)
• How Sears actually invented the digital economy and how mindset cost them the future
• Why "deviance first, alignment later" is the funnel every leader gets backwards
• The CIO joke that isn't funny: Career Is Over as soon as you take the job
• Why the first pancake is never a good pancake — and what FAIL really stands for

Chapters: 00:00 Innovation in the AI era 01:03 Sponsor and book intro 01:40 Why change fails 02:36 Trilogy origins 06:12 Paradox and mindset 07:58 Why organisations punish their innovators 10:28 Luis, Rapid X, and Operation Warp Speed 16:52 Meaning over happiness 18:06 Time, not targets 19:45 The paradox mindset cycle 24:34 Marriage and money paradox 28:15 Conflict fuels change 32:27 Missed futures examples 36:44 Practice beats theatre 38:04 Builders versus bureaucrats 41:05 Skin in the game 42:35 Blocked by superiors 43:45 Leaders spot talent 44:49 Disruptors and failure 48:05 Boundaries create freedom 51:43 Innovation needs hideouts 53:59 Stories build culture 59:45 The seven paradoxes explained 01:07:38 Deviance, then alignment 01:13:10 The paradox mindset cycle 01:18:26 Final takeaways and wrap

About Jeff and Staney DeGraff Jeff DeGraff is the "Dean of Innovation" — Clinical Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, founder of the Innovatrium, and author of multiple bestselling books on creative leadership. Staney DeGraff is co-founder of the Innovatrium and Jeff's longtime collaborator. Together they've worked with half the Fortune 500 on what it actually takes to make change stick.

📘 The Art of Change — https://amzn.to/48mhX54

🌐 https://jeffdegraff.com

About The Innovation Show

The Innovation Show with Aidan McCullen is the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Each week, Aidan sits down with world-class authors, scientists, and practitioners to call out the "Emperor is naked" moments and explore disruption, transformation, leadership, and the ideas shaping tomorrow.

Connect 🌐 https://theinnovationshow.io

📨 Substack (and a chance to win a copy of The Creative Mindset): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669

🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Sponsor

This series is brought to you by Kyndryl. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.

#ParadoxMindset #JeffDeGraff #TheArtOfChange #Innovation #ChangeManagement #Leadership #TheInnovationShow #AidanMcCullen #Thinkers50 #InnovationPodcast #LeadershipPodcast #DisruptionTheory

Creativity isn't reserved for geniuses—it's a skill you can learn, practice, and compound over time.

In this episode of The Innovation Show, Aidan McCullen sits down with Jeff and Staney DeGraff to explore their practical framework for everyday creativity: the C.R.E.A.T.E. method. Based on decades of research and real-world application, they break down how innovation actually happens—not through lightning bolts, but through small, iterative wins.

From clarifying the real problem to evaluating ideas effectively, this conversation reframes creativity as a disciplined, learnable process.

Sponsored by Kyndryl, this episode also includes a giveaway for subscribers.

• Why creativity is a learnable skill (not a talent)
• The power of small wins and iterative thinking
• How to identify the real problem before solving it
• Techniques like SCAMPER, analogies, and storyboarding
• Why evaluation—not ideation—often determines success
• How constraints and failure fuel innovation

• Clarify – Define the real problem through iteration
• Replicate – Reapply ideas across domains
• Elaborate – Generate ideas using creative techniques
• Associate – Connect ideas through analogy and systems thinking
• Translate – Turn ideas into compelling stories
• Evaluate – Select the best ideas using structured methods

00:00 Sponsor and Giveaway 00:45 Creativity as Learnable Skill 04:59 Find Your Creative Rhythm 11:11 Constraints and Small Wins 20:57 Clarify the Real Problem 25:25 Replicate and Reapply Ideas 29:01 Elaborate With Wordplay 36:43 Associate Through Analogies 40:43 Translate Into Story 46:09 Evaluate Ideas Wisely

Featured Book: The Creative Mindset by Jeff & Staney DeGraff

Find the DeGraffs: https://jeffdegraff.com

Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50 Innovation Award winner, keynote speaker Ireland, and host of The Innovation Show—the only podcast ever to receive a Thinkers50 award.

In this episode of The Innovation Show, Aidan McCullen is joined by Jeff and Staney DeGraff, co-authors of The Innovation Code, to explore a powerful idea: innovation emerges from the tension between opposing perspectives—not from consensus.

Drawing on decades of research and real-world application, they introduce four archetypes that shape how individuals and organisations innovate:

• The Artist (creation & ideas)
• The Engineer (process & execution)
• The Athlete (performance & results)
• The Sage (values & culture)

Each brings strengths—and blind spots.

The key? Not eliminating conflict—but orchestrating it.

In this episode:

• Why alignment can actually kill innovation
• The role of constructive conflict in high-performing teams
• How different mindsets clash—and why that's essential
• The lifecycle of innovation and who leads at each stage
• Why organisations fail when they can't change their worldview
• How to build cultures of adaptability and reinvention

Featured Book:

The Innovation Code by Jeff & Staney DeGraff

Find the DeGraffs: https://jeffdegraff.com

Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50 Innovation Award winner, keynote speaker Ireland, and host of The Innovation Show—the only podcast ever to receive a Thinkers50 award.

In this episode, Stephen Wunker and Jonathan Brill explore the concept of the Octopus Organization, where intelligence is distributed, decisions happen at the edge, and workflows—not jobs—are automated. Drawing on biology, they explain how autonomy, governance, and visibility can coexist to unlock speed, resilience, and innovation.

The discussion dives into overcoming organizational debt, avoiding groupthink and analysis paralysis, and shifting from rigid hierarchies to adaptive "kill web" structures. Real-world examples—from L'Oréal's rapid product cycles to AI-powered patent creation at Deep Invent—highlight how companies are already transforming.

This episode is essential listening for leaders looking to redesign their organizations for the AI era.

In this episode of The Innovation Show, Aidan McCullen speaks with Barry Nalebuff — Yale professor, entrepreneur, and author of Split the Pie — about a principled approach to negotiation built around one simple idea: identify the pie, the extra value created only when both sides reach agreement, and split it equally.

Rather than relying on pressure, posturing, or arbitrary bargaining, Barry shows how negotiation can become a logical, ethical, and data-driven process. Drawing on cooperative game theory and real-world business experience, he explains why most people misunderstand what is actually being negotiated — and how that confusion leads to bad deals and bad relationships.

The conversation includes examples from:

Barry's mother buying her rented home,

Coca-Cola's acquisition of Honest Tea,

a negotiation with a domain-name squatter,

grant funding and workload-sharing examples,

lease-breaking, tax-loss mergers, and everyday fairness disputes.

This is a practical episode for founders, executives, investors, academics, negotiators, and anyone who wants to create better outcomes through principle instead of power plays.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• What Barry Nalebuff means by "the pie"

• Why fairness starts with understanding the real source of value

• How to negotiate without aggression or manipulation

• Why principles beat arbitrary numbers

• How game theory can improve business and life decisions

• How to avoid accepting less than your fair share

Timestamps

00:00 Sponsor Message

00:28 Negotiation Without Jerk

01:50 Split The Pie Idea

03:29 Dollar Bill Example

05:15 Mom House Deal

11:49 Talmud Cloth Principle

14:22 Honest Tea Coke Bottles

17:16 Coke Buyout Terms

22:02 Domain Troll Negotiation

27:33 Holding Firm on Fairness

28:36 Principles Over Arbitrary Numbers

31:17 Anju and Bharat Interest Puzzle

35:35 Power and Hidden Pie Ethics

37:23 Game Theory and Spock Logic

42:09 Sisyphus Grant Split Example

48:46 Breaking the Lease Loss Pie

52:01 Mergers Tax Losses and Equality

53:12 Fairness Equity and Negotiation Ethics

56:28 Where to Find Barry

57:29 Sponsor and Sign Off

In this episode, strategy professor Timo Partanen, former Nokia market intelligence leader (2001–2009), reveals what was really inside Nokia's internal iPhone threat briefing presented to senior leadership.

Nokia had tracked Apple for years. They saw the signals like touchscreen innovation, strategic hires, and shifting user expectations. The iPhone's hardware wasn't the surprise.

The real shock was Apple's ecosystem.

From its exclusive partnership with Cingular (AT&T) to alliances with Google and Yahoo, Apple didn't just launch a product, it launched a new business model. One that exposed Nokia's blind spot: a hardware-first culture in a platform-driven world.

We explore why clear warnings didn't lead to action, how strategy broke down between leadership and execution, and what today's companies can learn about disruption, partnerships, and transformation.

This is a story about missed shifts, internal friction, and the difficulty of turning insight into impact.

In this episode, we explore the hidden driver of strategy under pressure: emotion.

Drawing on research based on 100+ interviews inside Nokia between 2007 and 2013 , INSEAD's Quy Huy and Aalto University's Timo Vuori join Aidan McCullen to explain how large organizations can execute radical pivots—not just through analysis, but through structured emotion regulation.

We unpack how Nokia moved from denial, fear, and rigid thinking to a disciplined, data-driven, and emotionally aware strategy process that enabled it to exit mobile phones and rebuild around networks and 5G.

You'll learn:

• Why strategy fails when emotions go unmanaged

• How boards can shape better decisions by regulating—not suppressing—emotion

• The role of consultants, teams, and partners in expanding strategic thinking

• Why discussing failure systematically leads to better outcomes

• How to design strategy processes that work under uncertainty

This is not just a story about Nokia—it's a blueprint for any organization navigating disruption, uncertainty, and high-stakes decisions.

Sponsored by Kyndryl – helping the world's leading organizations modernize and run mission-critical systems for smarter decisions and lasting competitive advantage.

But the real story behind Nokia's collapse is far more complex — and much more human.

At its peak Nokia controlled nearly 50% of the global mobile phone market and had over one billion customers. Yet within a few years the company lost the smartphone war as Apple and Google reshaped the industry.

In this episode we continue our deep dive into the research of Quy Huy and Timo Vuori, whose study reveals how fear inside Nokia distorted communication and decision-making. Senior leaders felt intense pressure from competitors and investors, while middle managers feared delivering bad news. The result was silence, denial, and what the researchers call "collective lies."

We explore how Nokia became trapped by its Symbian platform, how short-term financial pressures undermined long-term innovation, and why leadership dynamics and organizational culture can determine the fate of even the most dominant companies.

The lesson: strategy often fails not because of technology — but because leaders stop hearing the truth.

Quy Huy (INSEAD) and Timo Vuori (Aalto University)—authors of the 2016 research on Nokia's collapse—explain how leaders hid emotions behind "technology and finance talk," how dissent was punished, and how misaligned fearformed: executives feared competitors and shareholders while middle managers feared their bosses. We connect the dots to psychological safety, power traps, poker-face leadership, burnout, and what this teaches leaders facing AI disruption today.

Find Quy

https://www.insead.edu/faculty-personal-site/quy-huy

https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/nokias-reinvention-was-emotionally-driven

Find Timo

https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/timo-vuori/

https://adaptivevolcano.com/about

Presidents, CEOs, and Wall Street relied on its encrypted devices. Then the iPhone arrived — and everything changed.

In this episode, Jacquie McNish, co-author of Losing the Signal, unpacks the untold story behind:

• The improbable rise of Research In Motion • The 2011 global outage crisis • The NTP patent war • 9/11 and encrypted messaging dominance • The internal fracture between Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie • The Storm failure • The QNX pivot and BlackBerry's second act

A fascinating case study in leadership psychology, technological disruption, and strategic inflection points.

This is a masterclass in: Innovation Leadership Disruption Scaling culture Strategic blindness Corporate inflection points

📘 Book: Losing the Signal by Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff https://amzn.to/4tVBHWk

🎙 Hosted by Aidan McCullen Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50 Innovation Award winner, recognised for his contribution to global innovation practice through The Innovation Show.

Aidan is a Global and Irish Keynote speaker recognized for his engaging storytelling style and his bestselling book Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention. The Innovation Show remains the only podcast ever to receive a Thinkers50 award, and Aidan is only the second Irish person—after Charles Handy—to be honoured.

#BlackBerry #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #TechHistory #Leadership #StartupLessons #iPhone #Apple #Entrepreneurship #Disruption

Chuck breaks down the 4 intrapreneur traits (curiosity, perspective, resilience, and comfort with data) and the overlooked career skill that makes or breaks intrapreneurs: managing down AND managing up. Learn how to build team trust, navigate organizational politics, make "invisible work" visible, and persuade decision-makers to keep the right bets alive.

He also challenges traditional project review approaches (IRR, cost/schedule targets, early sales projections) and introduces his practical alignment tool: the Return Map — a living, cross-functional view that integrates investment, revenue, and profit over time, assigns accountability across functions, and forces iterative re-forecasting as reality changes (slips, market windows, manufacturing costs, and sales forecasts).

In this episode

• Why innovation feels like "snakes and ladders" inside large organisations

• Steve Jobs as a blueprint: iPod → iTunes → iPhone as a strategic cycle

• Managing up: credibility, trust, and navigating corporate politics

• Why HQ metrics can kill risky projects too early

• Brunnergrams vs strategy: what engineering tracking misses

• How Return Maps improve alignment, accountability, and forecasting

• Teaser: a future conversation with Kodak digital camera inventor Steve Sasson

Sponsor: Kyndryl

We discuss digital transformation strategy, AI in business, disruptive innovation, platform business models, network effects, and leadership in the age of AI.

If you're navigating digital transformation or AI strategy, this episode is essential listening.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:35 Meet the Digital Transformation Expert

01:38 Impact of the Digital Transformation Playbook

05:40 Evolution of Digital Transformation

07:24 The Role of AI in Digital Transformation

09:21 Frameworks and Theories of Disruption

09:38 The Story of Encyclopedia Britannica

16:59 Understanding Business Disruption

24:44 Disruptive Business Model Map

33:12 Understanding Network Effects

34:41 Same Side vs. Cross Side Network Effects

38:01 The Challenge of Competition in Platform Businesses

42:21 The Importance of Platform Business Models

46:13 Four Types of Platform Businesses

49:19 Platform Business Model Map

54:28 Value Train Analysis

01:02:22 The Evolution of Digital Transformation

Find David:

https://davidrogers.digital/about/

🎯 We cover:

The pivot from country to global pop dominance

How Taylor handled public backlash & the Kanye/Kardashian controversy

Her savvy response to the streaming revolution

Ownership battles over her masters and how it reshaped the industry

Building the Eras Tour as a pinnacle of fan-first strategy

What businesses can learn from Taylor's "anti-fragile" mindset

Whether you're a fan, a founder, or fascinated by the music business, this is a powerful look at how strategy meets stardom.

🔗 Learn more about Kevin's book: nothinglikethisbook.com

🎧 Subscribe and leave a review to support the show!

https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

From fearless reinvention and blue ocean strategy to her mastery of fan engagement and brand evolution, Taylor Swift's rise is a masterclass in innovation, leadership, and vision. Learn how her career mirrors the strategic moves of top businesses, and what leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators can take away from her story.

Tune in for:

The psychology and strategy behind Swift's career decisions

How she shaped fan culture and digital engagement

Lessons in brand authenticity, creative growth, and leadership

What businesses can learn from Swift's reinvention and market disruption

Whether you're a Swiftie, strategist, or business leader, this episode offers sharp insights into how to turn art into lasting impact.

Find Kevin: https://www.nothinglikethisbook.com

In this episode, we cut through the noise and get straight to the point—literally. Communication expert and author Joel Schwartzberg returns to discuss the art and science of clarity in communication. Whether you're a leader, innovator, speaker, or simply want to stop rambling and start resonating, this episode is packed with practical, game-changing advice.

We explore:

• Why having a clear point is the cornerstone of influence

• How to sharpen your message with Joel's "I believe" and "XY" tests

• The power of pausing, volume, and emotional contagion in speech

• How to handle interruptions with grace and still deliver your message

• Real-life analysis of effective speeches (including a powerful moment from Demi Moore)

• The role of AI in crafting and questioning your communication

• Sticking the landing: how to end your message with lasting impact

💡 If you've ever struggled to communicate a big idea or felt your message wasn't landing—this episode is your ultimate toolkit.

🔗 Show Notes & Resources:

• Joel's website: joelschwartzberg.net

• Book: Get to the Point (Updated 10-Year Anniversary Edition)

• Sponsored by: Kyndryl.com

Innovation Show https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Discover how organizations often suppress insights, and why a focus on predictability and perfection can kill innovation. Learn about his new concept of Insight Audits and how leaders can shift their environments to better capture the power of spontaneous insight.

Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review if you enjoy these deep dives into cognitive science, decision-making, and innovation.

More at theinnovationshow.io

Gary Klein, insight generation, organizational innovation, decision making, cognitive psychology, seeing what others don't, leadership, business strategy, Aidan McCullen, the innovation show

Recorded nearly a decade ago, this episode dives deep into:

• The rise of the algorithm-driven economy

• How tech giants like Amazon and Facebook dominate using data and intelligence

• The decline of traditional media and the shift to subscription-based models

• The retail apocalypse and how Amazon continues to reshape consumer behavior

• The emerging power of voice technology and screenless interaction

Scott also offers strategic insights into the future of media, marketing, and retail, with takeaways that still resonate in today's digital landscape.

This episode is brought to you with thanks to our sponsor, Kyndryl, helping global enterprises harness the power of AI and digital infrastructure for competitive advantage.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:15 Algorithm-Driven Economy

• 08:46 Subscription Models

• 12:48 Traditional Media Challenges

• 24:40 Retail Apocalypse & Amazon

• 29:02 Rise of Voice Technology

• 33:01 Conclusion and Sponsor Message

Learn more at: https://www.kyndryl.com

Subscribe to The Innovation Show for weekly insights into innovation, transformation, and leadership.

Welcome to episode 2 of our exclusive Harvard Business School series! 🎓 Join host Aidan McCullen as he interviews Paul Nunes, renowned as the King of the S-Curve, in a masterclass on navigating today's fast-evolving business cycles.

📈 Discover how exponential technology change is collapsing traditional life cycles and creating "Shark Fin" business models—where sudden success can be catastrophic and strategic timing is everything. Paul explains how companies like Netflix, Apple, Peloton, and Intel navigated (or missed) these cycles and what it means for your business.

🔥 Learn about Big Bang Disruption, the death of early adopters, managing multiple S-curves, the rise of orchestrator firms, and how strategy must evolve for verticalized industries, fleeting advantage, and supply chain complexity.

⏰ Timestamps for Key Topics:

00:00 - Introduction and Welcome

00:26 - The Evolution of S-Curves

01:43 - What is the Shark Fin Strategy?

03:52 - Managing Multiple S-Curves

05:29 - Rapid Market Change & Business Lifecycle

07:42 - Case Studies: American Giant & Peloton

10:30 - The New Supply Chain Realities

18:01 - Is Vertical Integration Still Viable?

24:13 - Strategy in the Age of Compression

24:34 - Industry Diversification & Component Thinking

25:17 - Nvidia, Intel, and Strategic Orchestration

27:02 - Innovation vs. Manufacturing Models

33:15 - Capital Investment, Risk & Timing

39:06 - Why the Chief Strategy Officer Role is More Crucial Than Ever

47:55 - Final Reflections & Thank Yous

💡 Whether you're a strategist, innovator, entrepreneur, or business leader, this episode is a must-watch to future-proof your thinking and strategy.

📚 Based on Paul's seminal works: Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption, and Pivot to the Future

🔗 Watch, learn, and subscribe for more expert-led strategy content!

#SCurve #BigBangDisruption #PaulNunes #SharkFinStrategy #BusinessStrategy #Innovation #ChiefStrategyOfficer #AidanMcCullen #HBS #Nvidia #Intel #Netflix #Apple #Peloton #ExponentialChange #FutureOfBusiness

In this special episode of The Innovation Show, recorded at Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School, Aidan McCullen sits down with renowned psychologist and researcher Teresa Amabile to explore one of the most underestimated transitions we face: the move out of a long-held role and into what comes next.

Drawing on a ten-year study of 120 professionals—many healthy, financially secure, and highly accomplished—Amabile reveals a striking insight: when people hear the word retirement, their dominant associations are fear, uncertainty, and loss of identity. And that fear has little to do with money or health.

This conversation reframes retirement as a broader human challenge: how we navigate endings, detach from identities that once defined us, and rebuild a life structure that still allows for progress, meaning, and contribution. Amabile outlines the four core tasks people must work through when leaving a career, why these tasks rarely happen in a neat sequence, and why "it takes work to stop working."

The discussion also examines the role organisations play—often poorly—in this transition. From sidelining experienced contributors to missing opportunities for knowledge transfer, Aidan and Teresa explore how meaningful final assignments, creative work, rituals, and continued post-retirement connection can dramatically improve outcomes for both individuals and institutions.

Along the way, Amabile introduces the Four A's framework—Alignment, Awareness, Agency, and Adaptability—as a practical lens for navigating not only retirement, but any major life or career transition. The episode closes with a nuanced exploration of purpose, showing how meaning in later life often shifts away from grand missions toward day-to-day quality, relationships, and contribution.

This is not an episode about "retiring early" or financial planning. It's about renewal, identity, and preparing—psychologically, relationally, and structurally—for the transitions we all know are coming, but rarely prepare for.

Recorded live at Harvard Business School with thanks to the production team Dave, Ellie and Simona and sponsor Kyndryl.

In this episode, Scott shares insights from his groundbreaking book, Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World. Through compelling historical parallels and modern business cases, he uncovers the hidden patterns that define true disruptive innovation and how leaders can respond with resilience and creativity.

From Henry Ford and the Model T to the fall of Constantinople, from Netflix vs. Blockbuster to the scientific revolution, Scott connects past transformations to today's urgent innovation challenges. He unpacks powerful concepts like emergent strategy, value networks, and the critical role of business models in enabling — or blocking — change.

Whether you're a startup founder, corporate leader, or curious learner, this episode delivers practical, thought-provoking guidance on navigating disruption in real time.

Special thanks to the Harvard Business School Publishing team for hosting us, and to our sponsor Kyndryl for their continued support of forward-thinking conversations on The Innovation Show.

The difference between sustaining vs. disruptive innovation

Why innovation diffusion is often slower than we think

Lessons from the Honda Super Cub and Kodak's collapse

How McDonald's, the printing press, and scientific revolutions disrupted systems — not just products

Actionable frameworks like the ABCs of Dual Transformation

00:00 Introduction and Acknowledgements

00:22 Introducing Today's Guest: Scott D. Anthony

01:38 Defining Innovation and Disruption

04:10 Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovation

07:03 Netflix vs. Blockbuster: A Case Study

07:47 The Value Network and Market Dynamics

16:50 Emergent Strategy and the Honda Super Cub

18:37 Gunpowder and the Innovator's Dilemma

23:03 The Fall of Constantinople: A Lesson in Disruption

32:42 The Printing Press: Collaboration and Consequences

35:50 The Slow Diffusion of Innovations

38:24 The Kodak Story: A Tale of Missed Opportunities

44:17 The ABCs of Dual Transformation

50:10 The Historical Impact of the Scientific Revolution

56:04 McDonald's: Revolutionizing the Fast Food Industry

01:05:07 The Persistence of Henry Ford and the Model T

01:09:25 Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

Quotes from the Episode:

"Innovation is something different that creates value... Disruption takes things that were complicated and expensive, makes them simple and affordable, and changes market dynamics." — Scott D. Anthony

"History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes... The walls that stood for a thousand years collapsed in 47 days. What is your equivalent to the Theodosian Walls?" — Scott D. Anthony

Links & Resources:

Book: Epic Disruptions by Scott D. Anthony

Website: EpicDisruptions.com

Connect with Scott: LinkedIn

Connect with The Innovation Sho

Connect with Aidan: LinkedIn

Tags/Keywords: Disruptive Innovation, Scott D. Anthony, Clayton Christensen, Business Strategy, Corporate Transformation, History of Innovation, Dual Transformation, McDonald's Case Study, Kodak, Artificial Intelligence, The Innovation Show, Aidan McCullen.

How do you drive real innovation inside a large organisation—without getting shut down by hierarchy, process, or short-term thinking?

In this episode of The Innovation Show, host Aidan McCullen is joined by legendary Hewlett-Packard intrapreneur Chuck House, author of Permission Denied, for a deep dive into intrapreneurship, corporate innovation, and innovation leadership.

Drawing on decades of experience building breakthrough technologies at HP, Chuck shares the 7 rules of intrapreneurship, explains why most organisations unintentionally kill innovation, and reveals what both intrapreneurs and leaders must do differently to succeed.

• The key differences between entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs

• Why intrapreneurs need air cover, not permission

• The 7 rules every intrapreneur must follow

• Why doing your own market research is non-negotiable

• How asking "why" relentlessly leads to breakthrough innovation

• Why great intrapreneurs often look like troublemakers

• How leaders can identify, fund, and empower intrapreneurs

• Why traditional KPIs and program reviews fail exploratory innovation

• Lessons from Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and major corporate innovation efforts

The conversation also explores the rarely discussed discipline of managing intrapreneurs, including how executives can create the conditions for innovation without smothering it with metrics, timelines, or control systems designed for incremental work.

This episode is essential listening for:

• Innovation leaders and executives

• Transformation and strategy teams

• Corporate intrapreneurs

• Product leaders and change agents

• Anyone trying to innovate inside a complex organisation

Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50 Global Innovation Award winner (2025), founder of the Reinvention Summit, and host of the globally acclaimed Innovation Show. A bestselling author and former international rugby player, Aidan advises global organisations on innovation, transformation, and leadership.

Chuck House is a pioneering intrapreneur whose work at Hewlett-Packard helped shape modern computing and systems innovation. His book Permission Denied is widely regarded as essential reading for corporate innovators.

🔔 Subscribe to The Innovation Show for conversations with the world's leading thinkers on innovation, transformation, leadership, and the future of work.

In this episode of The Innovation Show, Chuck House—legendary HP intrapreneur and author of Permission Denied—joins Aidan McCullen, host of The Innovation Show and a Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, to explore the real dynamics behind innovation inside large organizations.

House shares how he repeatedly challenged assumptions, defied orders, built high-performing teams, and navigated the "corporate immune system" to create breakthrough technologies such as the logic analyzer and Pisces system. Together, Chuck and Aidan unpack why innovation is resisted, how success blinds leaders to the next paradigm shift, and what intrapreneurs must do to survive and thrive.

Brought to you by Kyndryl, this conversation blends deep corporate experience with modern innovation thinking—from one of HP's most impactful engineers and one of the world's leading thinkers on transformation and change.

• Why organizations punish failure while preaching innovation

• The paradox of permission: what leaders say vs. what innovators hear

• How established success blinds teams to new paradigms

• Emotional and psychological realities of intrapreneurs

• How to unlearn, relearn, and escape old mental models

• Why existing sales forces resist innovative products

• Hard-earned lessons from HP's logic analyzers & the Pisces project

• What leaders must do to build systems—not heroes—that drive innovation

00:00 Intro & Sponsor

00:30 Chuck House returns

00:57 Defiant innovation at HP

01:44 Permission paradox

03:07 Amazon's failure philosophy

03:47 Radical transparency

05:16 Future architecture & vision

06:00 Chuck reflects on his journey

07:47 AMD recruitment story

17:02 Paradigm shifts

19:34 Organizational resistance

22:42 Innovation cycles

32:26 Unlearning & relearning

40:16 The irony of pointing fingers

40:45 Navigating new paradigms

44:18 Challenges of intrapreneurship

44:33 Winning the sales channel

45:09 Sales force resistance

51:44 Understanding real customers

53:08 Innovation vs incrementalism

01:03:03 Rise & fall of logic analyzers

01:08:00 Managing intrapreneurial projects

01:13:06 Quality, collaboration & culture

01:20:34 Closing reflections

Chuck House is an award-winning engineer, HP Fellow, and author of Permission Denied. His innovations shaped decades of computing and instrumentation, and his perspective on intrapreneurship remains profoundly relevant.

Aidan McCullen is an author, global keynote speaker, innovation consultant, and host of The Innovation Show. A former international rugby player for Ireland, he later moved into transformation roles across media and technology. Aidan is the author of Undisruptable, lectures on emerging technology at Trinity College Dublin, and is recognised by Thinkers50 for his global contribution to innovation and reinvention.

https://aidanmccullen.com

What makes this conversation extraordinary is that, unknown to everyone at the time of recording, each participant would receive a major Thinkers50 recognition just hours later:

• Sangeet Paul Choudary — Thinkers50 Strategy Award

• Howard Yu — reaffirmed in the Thinkers50 global ranking

• Alex Osterwalder — reaffirmed in the Thinkers50 global ranking

• Aidan McCullen — Thinkers50 Innovation Award

This episode captures four award-winning perspectives before the accolades were announced—an unfiltered, spontaneous exchange on the real work of reinvention.

AI is reshaping the business landscape, but most organisations focus on tools rather than the deeper question: How must business models, organisational structures, and leadership mindsets evolve in an AI-driven world?

Together, Alex, Howard, Sangeet, and Aidan unpack:

• Why 95% of GenAI projects fail and what organisations miss

• How AI reshuffles entire industries, not just processes

• The hidden role of corporate antibodies in killing new ideas

• Why visionary leadership matters more than ever

• How modular, fluid organisations create a real edge

• What learning engines look like in practice

• Why the real value moves from "answers" to sensemaking

• How leaders can place better bets in uncertainty

• Why it's not an "AI strategy" you need, but a strategy for the world AI creates

This is a masterclass in strategic reinvention from four globally recognised thinkers.

00:00 Introduction & Sponsor Message (Kyndryl) 00:41 The Confusing Landscape of AI in Business 01:20 Amara's Law & Business Impact 01:43 Panel Introduction at Thinkers50 02:25 Sangeet on Containerisation & Second-Order Effects 06:59 Osterwalder on Business Model Innovation 09:34 Yu on Capabilities & Industry Shifts 12:51 FOTO, Metaverse Missteps & Strategic Priority 15:21 Leadership Vision & the Capability Gap 21:32 Modularity & Learning Engines 37:00 Codifying an Innovation Culture 38:20 Vision Cascading Through Organisations 40:01 Why Good Ideas Fail to Scale 41:41 Leadership's Role in Innovation 43:13 From Sensing to Sensemaking 44:31 Exploration, Exploitation & Fluid Organisations 46:37 Continuous Change & Industry Reshuffling 49:04 The Future of AI in Business 50:33 Killing Projects & Resource Allocation 01:02:27 Closing Thoughts — Business Basics in an AI World

Alex Osterwalder – Prolific Author, Creator of the Business Model Canvas and co-founder of Strategyzer; Thinkers50 global thought leader.

Howard Yu – Author of Leap, LEGO Professor of Management & Innovation (IMD); Thinkers50 global thought leader.

Sangeet Paul Choudary – Author of Platform Revolution and Reshuffle; Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner.

Aidan McCullen – Author of Undisruptable, Host of The Innovation Show and Innovation Show, keynote speaker, and Thinkers50 Innovation Award winner.

📚 Resources & Links

• Strategyzer → https://www.strategyzer.com

• Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Reshapes the Knowledge Economy → https://amzn.to/3HWwj1I

• Platform Revolution → https://amzn.to/4mBq2aQ

• Sangeet's Substack → https://substack.com/@platforms/posts

• Howard's Substack → https://howardyu.substack.com

• Aidan's show notes → https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

• Undisruptable → https://amzn.to/4pCEhgH

Kyndryl designs, runs, and reimagines the mission-critical technology systems that power the world's largest organisations. Their AI-powered consulting and unmatched managed services help leaders make smarter decisions, accelerate innovation, and build enduring competitive advantage. Learn more at Kyndryl.com.

🎙️ Episode Title: Mastering Chaos: Navigating the BANI Future

👥 Guests: Bob Johansen & Jamais Cascio

💡 Sponsored by: Kyndryl | Reimagining the tech systems powering global enterprise innovation.

In this episode, Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio return to explore their book Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sensemaking Guide to a BANI World.

They dive into the evolution from VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) to BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) and its impact on leadership, strategy, and personal resilience.

🔍 Topics Include:

The origins and future of VUCA and BANI

VUCA+ and BANI+ frameworks

Real-world examples: LEGO, Netflix, Special Olympics, Airbnb

Leadership agility & "Flexive Command"

Future-back thinking and anticipatory history

AI, ethics, empathy & strategic foresight

Purpose, interconnectedness & sensemaking

This episode is essential for leaders, innovators, and future-thinkers navigating today's complex and chaotic world.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:24 Opening Quote and Guest Introduction

00:59 Understanding VUCA and VUCA Plus

04:36 Exploring BANI and BANI Plus

06:37 Future Back Thinking and Historical Patterns

09:33 The Concept of Flexive Command

11:01 Resilience and Bendability in Organizations

25:59 Empathy and Anxiety in Leadership

39:52 Debating AI and Guardrails

40:47 Ethics and Metaphors in AI

41:57 Kate Darling's Perspective on AI

43:31 The Language of AI

43:59 Robotics and Empathy

45:51 Mindfulness and Anxiety

47:18 Nonlinearity in BANI

48:04 Neuro Flexibility and Improv

50:40 Orthogonal Thinking and T-shaped People

53:17 Distant Early Warnings

59:50 Gaming and Nonlinear Thinking

01:09:30 Incomprehensibility and Interconnectedness

01:16:45 Faith and Purpose in a BANI World

01:20:45 Final Thoughts and Conclusion

🔗 Useful links:

• Navigating the Age of Chaos – ageofbani.com

• Bob Johansen – IFTF.org

• Jamais Cascio – openthefuture.com

• Kyndryl Institute – kyndryl.com/institute

• Aidan McCullen – aidanmccullen.com

#TheInnovationShow #BANI #VUCA #Leadership #FutureThinking #Chaos #Resilience #Innovation #Kyndryl #Thinkers50

In Part 1 of this two-episode series, Aidan McCullen is joined by futurists Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio, co-authors of Navigating the Age of Chaos: A Sensemaking Guide to a BANI World That Doesn't Make Sense. The trio unpacks the BANI Framework — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible — and explores how it helps us make sense of a world where traditional models like VUCA no longer apply.

Discover how anxiety, complexity, systemic fragility, and incomprehensible change are reshaping our lives and futures — and what we can do to adapt and thrive in the face of it all.

Key Discussion Points:

From VUCA to BANI: Why old models fail

System fragility and the myth of stability

Psychological burnout in the age of anxiety

Non-linear risk and delayed cause-effect dynamics

Incomprehensibility and the collapse of trust in truth

Links & Resources:

🌐 Book: Navigating the Age of Chaos – https://ageofbani.com

📘 Bob Johansen – https://www.iftf.org

🧠 Jamais Cascio – https://www.openthefuture.com

🎙️ Sponsored by Kyndryl – https://kyndryl.com

🎓 Host and Irish Keynote Speaker Aidan McCullen and The Innovation Show is the first podcast to be recognised by Thinkers50, the global ranking body for management thinkers.

https://aidanmccullen.com

For those wondering what the anime mentioned by Jamais is: One Piece, in particular the group in the series called the "Straw Hat Pirates."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Piece_(1999_TV_series)

https://www.npr.org/2025/10/05/nx-s1-5560980/gen-z-protesters-one-piece-pirate-flag

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:21 Reflecting on the Decade: 2015-2025

01:41 Introducing the B.A.N.I. Framework

02:24 Meet the Authors: Bob Johansen and Jamais Cascio

04:29 The Evolution from VUCA to BANI

16:18 Understanding Brittle in BANI

30:14 Exploring Anxious in BANI

37:03 Alan Watts and the Timeless Nature of Anxiety

38:18 Resilience in the Face of Extinction

39:30 The Persistent Relevance of VUCA

39:52 The Unique Challenges of BANI

41:13 Interconnected Crises and Their Compounding Effects

44:30 The Participatory Panopticon and Surveillance

49:28 Non-Linearity and Climate Hysteresis

01:00:23 Stochastic Terrorism and Its Implications

01:02:44 Incomprehensibility in a BANI World

01:10:37 Conclusion and Further Resources

Coming Soon:

👉 Part 2: BANI Plus – Flipping the Framework Positive

Chuck shares hard-won lessons from inside one of the world's most influential tech companies—revealing what it really takes to innovate from within. From helping pioneer the first commercial computer graphics display to earning HP's only-ever Medal of Defiance, Chuck's story is both a cautionary tale and a masterclass in intrapreneurial resilience.

Hosted by Aidan McCullen, Thinkers50 Award recipient for Innovation and keynote speaker based in Ireland.

🎧 Highlights include:

• Surviving and thriving as an intrapreneur

• Navigating organisational resistance

• Why engineers must meet customers

• Leadership in uncertain times

• Insights for today's innovation leaders

📖 Get Chuck's book: Permission Denied: Odyssey of an Intrapreneur:

https://amzn.to/3Xq2LxC

🌐 More on Aidan: www.aidanmccullen.com

Together, they explore The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World, diving deep into how code shapes our understanding of reality — from biology and evolution to artificial intelligence and the simulation hypothesis.

Discover how code is the new DNA, the universal language linking art, philosophy, and technology, and why rekindling curiosity, humility, and wonder is essential in our age of machines.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:18 The Power and Mystery of Code

01:33 Guest Introduction: Samuel Arbesman

02:26 The Magic of Code: Themes and Inspirations

03:53 Rekindling Wonder in Computing

11:01 Biology and Computation: A Deep Dive

14:43 Artificial Life and Evolution in Computing

24:17 Emergent Behavior and Evolutionary Contingency

28:28 Simulation Hypothesis: Reality as a Program

29:30 The Complexity of Digital Simulations

30:35 Weather Prediction and Simplified Models

32:00 The Physicality of Computing

33:17 The Simulation Hypothesis

39:05 The Role of Language in AI

44:09 Humanity and Technology

47:39 The Future of Technology and Society

57:00 Final Thoughts on Humility and Curiosity

• The connection between code, language, and human creativity

• How biology and computation mirror one another

• Artificial life, evolution, and digital ecosystems

• The simulation hypothesis: Are we living in code?

• The importance of humility, restraint, and curiosity in an AI-driven world

🔗 Find Sam: https://arbesman.net

A former international rugby player, Aidan now helps organisations and leaders adapt and evolve in an age of exponential transformation.

Get Sam's Book: https://amzn.to/3Xb8abN

Find the Innovation show: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

Why did the New York Stock Exchange shut down in 2015? What caused Toyota vehicles to accelerate without warning? Samuel reveals how technological "accretion" and interconnected systems create outcomes that even developers, engineers, and executives can't predict.

We discuss:

• Why technology often evolves beyond human comprehension

• How "spaghetti code" and legacy systems create systemic risk

• The biological limits of human understanding

• Generalists vs. specialists in innovation

• The balance between intellectual humility and progress

• How we can better live with—and design—overcomplicated systems

This is a must-listen for leaders, technologists, and innovators navigating today's complex digital ecosystem.

🎙 Hosted by Aidan McCullen, keynote speaker on change and innovation.

💡 Sponsored by Kyndryl

In this episode, Samuel Arbesman, complexity scientist and author of The Half-Life of Facts, joins Aidan McCullen to explore how what we know — and believe to be true — constantly evolves.

Together, they unpack how facts have a "half-life," why collaboration matters in a changing world, and how exponential knowledge growth reshapes science, strategy, and society.

In this episode:

• Why facts and truths decay over time

• How science self-corrects — from the Brontosaurus myth to the spinach iron story

• The concept of "meso-facts" — slowly changing knowledge

• How exponential growth drives innovation and discovery

• Why curiosity, humility, and adaptability are essential for leaders

📚 Guest: Samuel Arbesman — author of The Half-Life of Facts, Overcomplicated, and The Magic of Code.

🌐 https://arbesman.net | https://arbesman.substack.com

🎙️ Hosted by Aidan McCullen — international keynote speaker on change, transformation, and innovation, author of Undisruptable, and host of The Innovation Show.

💼 Brought to you by Kyndryl – helping leaders harness the power of technology for smarter decisions and faster innovation.

👉 https://www.kyndryl.com/ie/en/institute

📘 Connect with Aidan McCullen:

🌐 https://theinnovationshow.io

📰 Substack: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

📕 Book: Undisruptable

🎤 Speaking: https://aidanmccullen.com

You'll learn why Adobe's shift to the cloud was just Act 2, and why surviving in the new economy requires mastering Act 3—orchestration, data flows, and multiplayer collaboration.

💡 Topics include:

• Why collaboration isn't just a feature—it's a business model

• How AI is reshaping the architecture of value creation

• What John Deere, Shein, and Tesla can teach legacy companies

• The hidden difference between execution and orchestration

• How to make your business future-ready

📚 Books discussed: Leap by Howard Yu and Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary

🔗 Follow the guests:

Howard Yu – Substack: One Inch Ahead https://howardyu.substack.com

Sangeet Paul Choudary – Substack: Platforms https://platforms.substack.com

Aidan McCullen https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

🎙 Hosted by Aidan McCullen | Sponsored by Kyndryl

#InnovationShow #AdobeVsFigma #BusinessStrategy #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfWork #AI #PlatformEconomy

Hosted by Aidan McCullen, this episode explores real-world strategies rooted in research—from the Zeigarnik Effect to motivational boosts like loss aversion, endowed progress, and goal gradients.

Whether you're an educator, leader, or lifelong learner, this episode offers tools to rethink failure as a powerful ally in personal growth and innovation.

• Why failure can enhance memory and understanding

• The science of loss aversion and how to hack it for learning

• Endowed progress and goal gradient theory in practice

• How to spark curiosity and mastery in children and adults

• Building learning resilience and overcoming imposter syndrome

• A practical model for designing learning for yourself and others

• 🧠 Manu Kapur's Book: Productive Failure – https://amzn.to/3WzFuZD

• 🌐 Manu Kapur's Website: www.manukapur.com

• 🔗 Kyndryl Institute: www.kyndryl.com/institute

• 🎙️ Host: Aidan McCullen – www.TheInnovationshow.io

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:38 Welcoming the Guest: Manu Kaur

01:15 Understanding the Zeigarnik Effect

04:00 Affective Boost Levels: Loss Aversion and Endowed Progress

08:16 Goal Gradient and Personal Motivation

12:44 Growth Mindset and Effort

16:46 Children, Uncertainty, and Learning

21:51 Achievement Goals vs. Mastery Goals

26:27 Phenomenological Primitives and Learning

29:01 Understanding the Role of Context in Learning

31:49 The Power of Comparison and Contrast

34:34 Learning Through Metaphors and Case Studies

38:58 Addressing Imposter Syndrome and Embracing Challenges

41:14 Productive Failure in Learning and Growth

45:17 Designing Effective Learning Tasks

49:44 The Importance of Affective Draw in Mastery

56:13 Final Thoughts and Key Takeaways

Simon introduces his Expected Value (xV) framework, a new system that combines confidence, predicted value, time sensitivity, and strategic fit to prove innovation's worth in terms business leaders and CFOs understand. From case studies to the role of AI, Simon shows how xV helps organizations escape wasted budgets, align innovation with strategy, and create lasting competitive advantage.

We discuss:

• Why most companies fail at measuring innovation

• The pitfalls of innovation theatre and zombie projects

• How the xV formula works in real-world organizations

• Kill credits, project evaluation, and stopping bad investments early

• The role of AI and data science in innovation decisions

• Case studies including Nvidia and the S-Curve of technology adoption

👉 Get Simon's Book: https://xvbook.com

👉 Learn more about Wazoku: https://wazoku.com

👉 About our sponsor Kyndryl: https://kyndryl.com/institute

This episode is essential listening for innovation leaders, CFOs, strategists, and business executives who want to move beyond activity metrics and finally prove the real value of innovation.

From the RAP (Resource Allocation Process) model to the real-world case of BCE's diversification journey, Raynor unpacks how strategy is shaped by resource allocation, risk, and CEO intervention. Learn how top leaders can navigate uncertainty, overcome divisional barriers, and unlock strategic synergies.

🔑 What You'll Learn in This Episode

• Why strategies often fail — and the CEO's role in fixing them

• How the RAP model explains real-world decision-making

• Lessons from BCE's diversification journey

• The tension between divisional goals and corporate strategy

• Practical tools for managing risk and strategic integration

⏱️ Episode Guide 00:00 Intro & Kyndryl Overview 00:28 Historical Perspectives on Strategy 00:57 Approaches to Resource Allocation 02:36 Guest Introduction: Michael Raynor 03:13 Academic Journey & Mentors 07:35 The RAP Model Explained 11:32 Challenges in Strategic Decision Making 22:51 BCE's Diversification Story 31:46 Entering Mobile Telephony 32:28 Strategic Synergies & Capital Constraints 33:48 Independent Operations & Market Dynamics 35:19 Challenges of Strategic Integration 36:11 Retail Distribution & Evolutionary Lessons 38:36 Governance Rights & Incentive Structures 48:31 Historical Lessons & Modern Applications 58:20 Concluding Thoughts & Future Directions

🚀 Topics Covered: strategy, resource allocation, RAP model, diversification, BCE, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, CEO decision-making, real options, strategic integration.

👉 If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, share, and explore more insights at

https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

We uncover the Basic Knowledge Fallacy, debate Direct Instruction vs. Discovery Learning, and introduce the Four A's of Learning (Activation, Awareness, Affect, Assembly). Manu also explains why variability, struggle, and pretesting drive deeper learning, adaptability, and long-term success.

Whether you're an educator, business leader, coach, or lifelong learner, this conversation will transform the way you think about learning and growth.

00:00 – Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:33 – Welcoming the Guest: Manu Kapur

01:01 – Understanding the Basic Knowledge Fallacy

05:07 – Direct Instruction vs. Discovery Learning

08:08 – The Science Behind Productive Failure

14:01 – The Importance of Variability in Learning

21:14 – Pretesting and the Role of Struggle in Learning

26:43 – Final Thoughts and Cognitive Reflection Test

• Why the path to learning is as important as the knowledge itself

• The strengths and limits of direct instruction and discovery learning

• How the Four A's of Productive Failure create lasting understanding

• Why variability and desirable difficulties improve adaptability

• How struggle, pretesting, and impasses unlock deeper insights

📺 Watch more episodes of The Innovation Show: The Innovation Show on YouTube

🌐 Learn more about Manu Kapur: www.manukapur.com

📘 Get Manu's book Productive Failure: https://amzn.to/3KrdV1Q

🔑 What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why productive failure is the secret to lifelong learning

• How to turn mistakes into powerful growth mindset strategies

• Why even "good lectures" don't always create deep understanding

• How leaders and innovators can use failure to adapt in a changing world

• The psychology of resilience, success, and transformation

Find Manu Kapur: https://www.manukapur.com

From a soccer career cut short by injury to becoming a global thought leader in education innovation, Manu shares stories and research that challenge how we think about failure. Whether you're a teacher, leader, parent, or entrepreneur, this conversation will help you embrace failure as a pathway to success.

In this episode, Philip Atkinson — organizational coach, beekeeper, and author of Bee Wise: 12 Leadership Lessons from a Busy Beehive — shares powerful insights from the hive that apply directly to modern workplaces.

We explore:

• Why the queen bee is not really the leader of the hive

• How the waggle dance is a perfect metaphor for communication

• Why bees switch jobs throughout their lives and what that means for career growth

• How swarms make better decisions by consensus

• The importance of diversity, innovation, and collaboration in thriving organizations

📖 Learn more about Philip's work and book: beewisebook.com

🌐 Company site: hive-logic.com

📲 Socials: Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn → @BeeWiseBook

👤 Connect with Philip on LinkedIn: PhilipAtkinsonHiveLogic

✨ All proceeds from Bee Wise support Bees for Development, a charity helping families worldwide build sustainable livelihoods through beekeeping.

Discover why incumbents often fail—not from lack of innovation, but from failing to unlearn old architectures. Using the case of Figma vs. Adobe, we unpack how element-based design, governance-led workflows, and AI-first thinkingare redefining industries from design to law to construction.

Key takeaways:

• Why adapting mindsets matters more than adopting tools

• How AI is unbundling knowledge work and rewriting career paths

• The importance of governance in enterprise-wide collaboration

• Why the forgetting curve is as critical as the learning curve

Perfect for innovators, leaders, and professionals navigating the knowledge economy, this episode is a roadmap for thriving in a world of structural uncertainty where AI and cloud-native startups are rewriting the rules.

📚 Resources & Links

• Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Reshapes the Knowledge Economy

→ https://amzn.to/3HWwj1I

• Platform Revolution

→ https://amzn.to/4mBq2aQ

• Sangeet's Substack

→ https://substack.com/@platforms/posts

• Aidan's show notes

→ https://thethursdaythought.substack.com

🎙️ Listen now to learn how to reshuffle your thinking, your organization, and your career for the AI-driven future.

In this profound and candid episode, legendary Harvard Business School professors Joseph Bower and Clark Gilbertdismantle the myths of top-down strategy and reveal what actually drives innovation inside organizations — resource allocation.

Hosted by Aidan McCullen, this conversation connects over 50 years of organizational research with real-world disruption—from Clay Christensen's disruptive innovation, to Intel's strategic shifts, to why academic institutions resist change.

🔥 You'll learn:

• Why strategy emerges from internal decisions—not just executive planning

• The role of middle management and customer capture in strategic failure

• How organizations can manage dual transformation

• The secret behind Harvard's innovation blind spots

• Advice for innovators, executives, and scholars navigating complex systems

This is not your typical leadership podcast. It's a masterclass in innovation thinking, organizational change, and deep system insights — directly from the architects of the field.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:21 Introducing the Guests: Clark Gilbert and Joe Bower

01:02 Clark Takes Over as Host

01:33 The Connection Between Resource Allocation and Strategy

05:26 Challenges in Strategy Implementation

09:03 Case Studies and Real-World Examples

11:11 Issues in Academic Research

19:48 The Harvard Business School Case

28:10 The Teradyne Case Study

32:41 Elon Musk's Unique Management Style

35:21 The Power of Structural Context in Education

37:50 The Concept of Undermining in Business

39:23 Managing Cognitive Framing in a Changing World

44:06 The Importance of Deep Industry Knowledge

49:16 Advice for Future Scholars

55:56 Final Reflections and Gratitude

📚 Resources and People Mentioned:

• Book: From Resource Allocation to Strategy – by Bower, Gilbert & others
• Dual Transformation – by Clark Gilbert & Scott D. Anthony
• The Innovator's Dilemma – by Clayton Christensen
• Case Studies: Intel, Teradyne, Kodak, Harvard Business School

💡 Featured Thinkers Mentioned:

• Clayton Christensen – Disruptive innovation pioneer, HBS
• Tom Eisenmann – Strategy & entrepreneurship expert, HBS
• Donald Sull – Former HBS faculty, expert on execution and volatility
• Yves Doz – INSEAD professor, known for multinational innovation research
• Howard Yu – IMD professor; explored tech disruption in Asia
• Tomo Noda – Japanese academic and innovator in business education reform
• Robert Burgelman - MIT professor and prolific author

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:35 The Cultural Conditioning of Women

01:39 Guest Introduction: Elise London

02:01 Personal Struggles and Panic Attacks

03:48 The Pressure of Perfection

07:53 The Concept of Goodness in Women

13:45 Historical Myths and Gender Roles

19:17 The Origins of the Seven Deadly Sins

28:47 The Witch Trials and Cultural Trauma

37:08 Balancing Roles and Responsibilities

47:09 Embracing Discomfort and Presence

48:10 Understanding Envy as a Directional Signal

48:29 The Gateway to Other Sins: Envy

49:45 Women and Envy: A Cultural Examination

50:33 The Role of Envy in Personal Desires

53:21 Reframing Envy and Scarcity

54:28 The Impact of Cultural Narratives on Women

01:09:07 Pride and Gender Bias in the Workplace

01:17:13 The Importance of Sadness and Emotional Expression

01:28:23 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

Find Elise:

https://www.eliseloehnen.com

Podcast:

https://eliseloehnen.substack.com/p/the-podcast

Substack:

https://eliseloehnen.substack.com

New Book:

https://amzn.to/47pK7Mw

On Our Best Behaviour Book:

https://amzn.to/4owiQOH

In today's episode, we dive deep into the fascinating world of the gut-brain connection with Dr. Steven Gundry, a prolific author and expert on the subject. Starting with a brief introduction about our sponsor, Kyndryl, we explore the historical context of medical insights from figures like Hippocrates and Ignaz Semmelweis. Dr. Gundry shares compelling stories from his practice, including miraculous patient turnarounds attributed to gut health. We discuss the latest in microbiome research, the concept of leaky gut, and how our gut's terrain influences overall health. Learn about the critical role of bacteria in our body's ecosystem, the intelligence of microorganisms, and their impact on our well-being. Join us as we unlock the secrets of a balanced inner terrain and its implications for a healthier life.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:30 Dedications and Historical Insights

02:06 Guest Introduction: Stephen Gundry

03:04 Remarkable Patient Stories

07:19 The Gut-Brain Connection

12:52 Historical Debate: Pasteur vs. Bechamp

16:58 Microbiome Discoveries and Implications

19:08 Bacterial Intelligence and Communication

26:29 Elephant Communication and Eavesdropping

27:04 Understanding Leaky Gut

27:52 Aging Research and Sea Elegans

29:45 The Role of Tight Junctions in Gut Health

32:46 Impact of Diet and Antibiotics on Gut Health

36:44 Environmental Toxins and Autoimmune Diseases

37:40 Lipopolysaccharides and Immune Response

42:03 The Rise of Food Sensitivities and Allergies

47:05 Gut Microbiome and Food Cravings

48:10 Conclusion and Resources

Find Steven: https://drgundry.com

Join us as we explore classic case studies of companies like Blockbuster, Kodak, and Xerox, and uncover the untold stories behind their perceived failures.

We discuss the complexities of decision-making, the importance of controlling the narrative, and the crucial lessons business leaders can learn from past mistakes.

00:00 Welcome to the Innovation Show

01:55 The Innovator's Dilemma: A Classic Quote

02:05 Introducing the Guests: Greg Satel and Paul Nula

02:43 The Myth of Learning from Failures

03:07 Greg's Experience with Misaligned Case Studies

05:07 Paul's Perspective on Research and Interviews

05:17 The Complexity of Decision-Making in Organizations

15:30 The Blockbuster vs. Netflix Case Study

21:44 The Role of Leadership and Context in Business Decisions

43:45 Milking the Cash Cow: Challenges and Strategies

45:21 Blockbuster's Rapid DVD by Mail Transition

46:30 Adobe's Cloud Shift and Kodak's Digital Dilemma

48:42 Kodak's Struggle with Digital Photography

54:43 Fuji's Diversification Success

58:29 Intel's Missed Opportunities and Target Fixation

01:06:40 Xerox's Innovation and the Birth of the Laser Printer

01:20:44 Lessons from Xerox and Pixar's Origins

01:24:26 Empowering Emerging Leaders and Final Thoughts

Perfect for business leaders, strategists, and innovation professionals who want to move beyond the clichés and understand what truly drives long-term success—or failure.

Find Greg: https://gregsatell.com

Find Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-nunes-5351773/

🔗 Listen on your favorite podcast platform or visit: https://theinnovationshow.io

🧠 Featuring:

• Greg Satell – Author of Mapping Innovation

• Paul Nunes – Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership, Accenture Research

• Host: Aidan McCullen – Author of Undisruptable

00:00 Introduction and Giveaway Announcement

00:52 The Problem with Bureaucracy in Organizations

06:16 Case Study: Roche's Transformation

11:16 Leadership Reboot and Principles at Roche

20:31 Implementing Change: Design Teams and I Squads

26:34 Outcome-Based Planning and Resource Allocation

29:53 Resource Allocation and Organizational Ethos

31:16 Resilience in the Face of Challenges

32:59 Leadership and Change Management

37:47 Cross-Functional Squads and Collaboration

42:43 Patient-Centric Approach

46:31 Personal Accountability and Bureaucracy

50:30 Experimentation and Innovation

56:22 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Find Gary

https://www.garyhamel.com

00:00 Introduction to the Innovation Show

00:49 Welcoming Gary Hamel and Discussing Humanocracy

01:55 The Need for Organizational Reset

02:35 Motivation and Models for Change

03:40 Deep Mindset Changes and Migration Path

04:08 Case Study: Nucor's Innovative Management

11:29 Nucor's Management Model and Success

13:01 Empowerment and Reward Systems at Nucor

16:35 Coordination and Trust at Nucor

27:25 Humanocracy Traits and Nucor's Approach

42:30 The Evolutionary Process in Organizations

43:18 Avoiding Over-Specialization in the Workforce

45:04 The Role of AI in Modern Employment

47:01 Haier's Unique Management Model

52:33 Micro-Enterprises and Market Discipline

58:47 Ecosystem Micro Communities at Haier

01:01:14 Entrepreneurship and Ownership at Haier

01:12:42 The Downfall of Intel: A Case Study

01:23:11 Conclusion and Future Discussions

#GaryHamel #Humanocracy #InnovationShow #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalChange #PostBureaucracy #Haier #Nucor #AidanMcCullen #FlatOrganizations #StrategyExecution #RadicalManagement

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:58 Overview of Humanocracy

02:08 Gary Hamel's Return and Dedications

02:51 Audience Feedback and Testimonials

05:18 The Problem with Bureaucracy

09:46 Personal Anecdotes and Case Studies

17:37 Economic Implications of Bureaucracy

19:27 The Need for a New Management Model

38:26 Post-Bureaucratic Pioneers

39:28 The Shift in Mindset

39:45 Nucor's People-Centric Approach

41:01 The Bureaucratic Worldview

41:54 The Growth of Bureaucracy

44:04 The Persistence of Bureaucracy

45:44 The Role of Managers

55:29 Morningstar's Self-Management Model

01:01:58 The Importance of Principles

01:07:09 Concluding Thoughts and Future Topics

🎯 Subscribe now and follow the full Humanocracy playlist.

#GaryHamel #Humanocracy #Bureaucracy #FutureOfWork #AidanMcCullen #InnovationShow #OrganizationalChange #EmployeeEmpowerment #Leadership #PostBureaucracy #Decentralization #StrategyExecution #BusinessInnovation

In this episode, host Aidan McCullen delves into the intricacies of strategic innovation with Professor Robert Burgelman. The discussion focuses on the extension of the Joe Bower model, exploring organizational adaptation, strategic dissonance, and the strategic context process.

Burgelman elucidates four types of strategic context processes: rationalizing new initiatives, dissolving core business contexts, the emaciation of strategic contexts, and the fizzling out of proactive strategic contexts. Key insights include the balancing act between positional advantages and distinctive competencies, the dilemmas faced by multi-business companies, and the challenges of insufficient variation and co-evolutionary lock-ins. The episode also touches upon the importance of strategic leadership in navigating these complex dilemmas. This deep dive is a must-watch for anyone interested in organizational strategy and corporate innovation.

📘 Based on decades of research and experience alongside Andy Grove at Intel, Burgelman offers frameworks every leader needs to navigate uncertainty and disruption.

🎧 Hosted by Aidan McCullen 🎯 Featuring case studies from Intel, HP, Nokia, Apple, JetBlue & more

#RobertBurgelman #OrganizationalAdaptation #StrategicDissonance #AidanMcCullen #InnovationShow #IntelStrategy #NokiaCaseStudy #ClarkGilbert #GaryHamel #AndyGrove #StrategyExecution #CorporateInnovation #LeadershipDevelopment #BusinessTransformation #InnovationLeadership

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:45 Welcoming Professor Robert Burgelman

00:59 Strategic Dissonance and Context Processes

02:35 Intel's Strategic Context Evolution

07:13 Clark Gilbert's Duality Insight

09:07 Disruption from Above and Below

16:58 Intel's Competency and Position Traps

27:51 Multi-Business Dilemma

39:35 Adapting Organizations to Changing Environments

40:42 Case Study: Swedish Media Company ER Bony News

42:23 Challenges of Biased Leadership

42:51 Intel's Strategic Shifts and Learning Curves

44:47 Co-Evolutionary Lock-In Dilemma

46:06 Exploration vs. Exploitation in Organizations

47:25 Narrow Business Strategy Benefits

50:44 Corporate Venture Capital and AI

57:08 Disruptive Technology Dilemma

58:21 The iPhone's High-End Disruption

01:00:45 Nokia's Missed Opportunities

01:08:34 Strategic Leadership and Emotional Attachment

01:13:02 Concluding Thoughts and Future Discussions

Together, they explore the idea of strategic dissonance—when a company's day-to-day decisions conflict with its overarching strategy. Drawing from his research at Intel, Burgelman unpacks how induced and autonomous strategyinteract in complex organizations and how leaders like Andy Grove navigated high-stakes inflection points.

We cover:

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:42 Recap of Intel's History and Strategy

02:15 Intel's Early Innovations and Challenges

07:20 The Rise of Microprocessors

09:19 Strategic Shifts and Market Dynamics

14:36 Intel's Strategic Inflection Points

17:26 Internal and External Ecological Systems

24:55 Missed Opportunities and Strategic Inertia

30:23 Analyzing Strategy Models

37:06 Innovative Gel Product Failure

38:49 Forces in R&D and Management

39:30 Resource Allocation and Product Championing

40:50 Strategic Forcing and Market Growth

42:09 Challenges in New Business Development

44:05 Organizational Championing and Strategy

49:36 Cognitive and Political Dynamics

52:39 Navigating Corporate Innovation

01:00:28 Evolutionary Perspective on Strategy

01:01:47 Prospector, Defender, Analyzer, Reactor

01:06:28 Conclusion and Future Discussions

The discussion centers around a revolutionary view of corporate strategy using Intel Corporation's transformation over several decades. Professor Burgelman reframes strategy as an emergent and evolving organizational capability, influenced by Intel's shift from focusing on DRAMs to microprocessors. Key topics include the intricate relationship between top-down planning and emergent strategies, the role of internal and external selection environments, and the concept of strategic dissonance explained through examples from Intel's history. Join host Aidan and Professor Burgelman as they explore how strategic leadership and innovation can coalesce to drive corporate success in a competitive business landscape.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:30 Overview of Today's Episode

01:50 Guest Introduction: Professor Robert Burgelman

02:21 Early Career and Influences

04:07 Collaboration with Joe Bower

07:11 Intel's Strategic Shift

09:27 Andy Grove and Strategic Dissonance

19:35 Framework for Strategic Leadership

33:32 The Importance of Aligning Actions with Strategy

34:25 Intel's Strategic Shifts and Missed Opportunities

35:35 The Dangers of Dominance in an Industry

37:47 Disruptive Innovation and Strategic Inertia

51:04 Balancing Induced and Autonomous Strategy Processes

52:51 Organizational Ecology and Internal Selection

59:22 HP's Strategic Evolution and Corporate Splits

01:04:12 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Message

00:34 Purpose of the Book and Key Insights

01:59 Clark Gilbert's Journey and Joe Bower's Influence

03:21 Resource Allocation Theory in Practice

08:19 Anomalies and Theoretical Insights

09:46 Real-World Applications and Case Studies

18:33 Personal Reflections and Broader Implications

29:04 BYU Pathway and Dual Transformation

31:38 Gary Hamel's Insight on Resource Allocation

32:10 Challenges in Media Transformation

32:38 Digital vs. Analog Dilemma

33:15 Resource Allocation in Practice

36:23 Sales Team Resistance to Digital

38:39 Disruptive vs. Sustaining Innovations

42:24 The Role of Resource Allocation in Strategy

54:42 Non-Consumption and New Markets

58:03 Empathy and Organizational Change

59:15 Conclusion and Acknowledgements

Previous Episode with Clark Gilbert:

https://theinnovationshow.io/episode/clark-g-gilbert-on-dual-transformation/

"Where you stand depends on where you sit."

In this exclusive episode of The Innovation Show, Harvard legend Joseph L. Bower shares the untold story behind his groundbreaking work on Resource Allocation to Strategy — a theory that has shaped generations of business leaders, strategists, and scholars.

Bower reveals:

• How real strategy emerges through the decisions of middle managers

• Why structure drives strategy more than PowerPoint slides do

• What we can learn from Lou Hughes at Opel, and the power of acting before HQ gives permission

• Insights into companies like GM, Timken, and even Tesla

This is a masterclass in how strategy really works — not in theory, but on the ground.

Revisit the origins of strategic thought that still matter today.

00:00 Introduction and Sponsor Announcement

00:42 Introducing the Guest: Joseph L. Bower

03:16 The Origins of Resource Allocation Theory

05:30 Insights from the Field: Case Studies and Key Learnings

17:26 The Role of Empathy and Perspective in Management

20:57 Case Study: Opel's Strategic Response to the Berlin Wall

35:38 Case Study: Timken's Bottom-Up Acquisition

38:04 The Importance of Learning and Adaptation in Strategy

52:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

53:25 Closing Remarks and Sponsor Acknowledgment

Thanks to our sponsor Kyndryl:

https://www.kyndryl.com/us/en

In this episode, Aidan McCullen and Gary Hamel dive into the key principles of strategic intent and how companies can maintain competitiveness in a rapidly evolving market. They explore concepts like building layers of advantage, searching for vulnerabilities in competitors, and the importance of continuous learning and innovation. Using examples from the Japanese auto industry to modern companies like Komatsu and Roche, Hamel explains how ambitious strategy is vital for long-term success. This discussion is rooted in Hamel's acclaimed article 'Strategic Intent,' co-authored with CK Prahalad, offering timeless lessons for business leaders.

00:00 Introduction to Competitive Strategy

01:16 The Importance of Strategic Intent

05:14 Challenges in Modern Business Thinking

09:09 The Role of Ambition in Strategy

19:00 Case Studies: Komatsu and Beyond

25:39 The Need for Organizational Resilience

28:18 Komatsu vs. Caterpillar: Strategic Responses

28:52 Timeframes in Strategy: Short, Medium, and Long Term

29:25 The Importance of Ambitious Goals

30:56 Learning and Flexibility in Organizations

32:25 Strategic Intent vs. Strategic Planning

34:51 Challenges and Feasibility in Strategic Goals

36:41 The Role of Strategic Intent in Leadership

45:53 Building Competitive Advantage Through Skills

48:59 Global Competitors and Layers of Advantage

52:53 Final Thoughts and Recommendations

The 1989 Article: https://hbr.org/1989/05/strategic-intent-2

The Small Book: https://amzn.to/4kMiDo4

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:10 Adaptability in a Rapidly Changing World

00:47 Historical Perspective on Change

01:35 Technological and Social Upheaval

02:31 Examples of Industry Disruption

04:12 The Challenge of Continuous Reinvention

06:08 The Role of Values and Habits

08:54 Understanding Strategy Decay

13:51 The Predictable Demise of Strategies

20:26 The Corrupting Nature of Success

24:12 Identifying Defensive Language in Organizations

25:14 The Importance of Humility and Adaptability

25:34 Lessons from Radiohead and Resourcefulness

26:58 The Impact of Market Shifts on Companies

27:32 Strategic Agility and Human Foibles

28:07 The Changing Landscape of Education

30:44 Fashion Industry Trends and Predictions

33:56 Encouraging Innovation and Risk-Taking

40:28 The Farmer vs. Rancher Analogy

46:11 Concluding Thoughts and Contact Information

00:00 Introduction to the Book and Author

01:22 Dedication and Personal Insights

02:13 Book Structure and Context

03:29 The Importance of Values

04:02 Capitalism and Ethical Challenges

10:50 Learning from the Financial Crisis

16:53 Rediscovering Farmer Values

21:19 Renouncing Capitalism's Conceits

29:16 Reclaiming the Noble in Business

38:07 The Importance of Innovation

45:07 Conclusion and Contact Information

Gary Hamel, What Matters Now, Reinventing Management, Future of Work, Innovation Culture, Organizational Change, Capitalism Reform, Moral Leadership, Business Ethics, Corporate Accountability, Management Strategy, Values in Business, Adaptive Organizations, Leadership Innovation, Future-Ready Companies, Strategic Agility, Purpose-Driven Leadership, Post-Crisis Management, Employee Empowerment, Organizational Renewal

00:00 Introduction and Welcome Back

00:39 Exploring Gore's Unique Management Structure

04:13 Leadership and Followership at Gore

06:26 Commitments vs Assignments at Gore

08:07 Innovation and Collaboration at Gore

20:13 Google's Evolution and Challenges

26:25 Management Innovation: A Critical Necessity

27:00 A Disenchanted View of Google

28:17 The Importance of Lateral Communication

29:51 Utilizing Technology for Collective Intelligence

33:18 Challenging Organizational Orthodoxy

47:20 The Role of Purpose in Driving Change

52:39 Concluding Thoughts on Management Reinvention

The Future of Management, Gary Hamel, Management Innovation, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Collaboration, Gore, Bill Gore, Gore-Tex, Decentralized Management, Employee Empowerment, Hierarchy, Organizational Design, Innovative Companies, Workplace Culture, Management Practices, Leadership Development, Decision-Making, Peer Evaluation, Team Dynamics