Linda Hill is a Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s leading thinkers on leadership and innovation. Jason Wild is the CEO and founder of WISE (Wild Innovation and Strategy Excellence) and a long-time innovation and strategy leader inside global incumbents. Together (with co-author Emily Tadards), they’ve spent more than a decade studying how established organizations actually turn innovation into something that scales—and distilled the lessons into their new book, Genius at Scale.

The core idea is simple, but uncomfortable: in a world shaped by AI, complexity, and accelerating change, innovation rarely succeeds as a solo act. The winners don’t just build better products—they build better ecosystems, with leaders who can co-create across boundaries (inside the enterprise and far beyond it).

In this conversation, Linda and Jason explain why ecosystems are becoming the true unit of innovation, why culture is an unfair advantage competitors can’t copy, and why the most essential innovation leaders are often the least visible. They walk through their ABC framework—leaders as Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts—and what breaks when any one of those roles is missing.

If you’re trying to move faster, partner smarter, and scale what works, this episode gives you a practical lens for leading through uncertainty, building the social fabric for innovation, and creating the kind of movement others choose to join.

In this episode we cover:

• Why ecosystems (not firms) are becoming the unit of innovation—and what that changes for leaders
• The ABC framework: Architect, Bridger, Catalyst (and how these roles show up in real organizations)
• Why “culture” is a competitive advantage—and how leaders accidentally undermine it
• The underappreciated “bridger” role—and why org design and incentives often punish it
• Practical starting points: clarity of purpose, surfacing constraints, and creating faster learning loops

Episode timeline:

00:00 — Cold open: why no company can go it alone

00:30 — Sponsor: LHH

02:00 — “If you really know me…” (Linda + Jason)

03:35 — Definitions of strategy (optionality, choices, and adaptability)

08:40 — Why they wrote Genius at Scale

12:30 — Why ecosystems are rising (speed, capability gaps, AI)

17:00 — Can incumbents adopt an ecosystem approach?

22:30 — ABC framework: Architect, Bridger, Catalyst

28:40 — The most underappreciated role: the Bridger

33:30 — Why bridging is a career risk (and how to fix incentives)

41:45 — A practical tool: a “constraints dashboard” + radical transparency

45:30 — Where leaders should start

54:50 — How to keep learning from Linda + Jason

59:20 — Closing + thanks

Additional Resources:

Linda Hill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-hill-hbs/

Jason Wild: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwild/

Book: Genius at Scale — https://geniusatscale.com/

Sponsor: LHH Executive Solutions — https://www.lhh.com

Thank you to our sponsor, LHH

Thank you to our guest John Fallon. Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast

Neil Hoyne is Chief Strategist at Google and one of the sharpest voices on how companies actually make decisions when data, intuition, and organizational politics collide. He works at the intersection of strategy, analytics, and customer value, helping leaders think more clearly about what metrics mean, how to use them, and where they can quietly mislead. He is also the author of Converted and is currently working on a new book exploring how strategy frameworks can be applied to careers and life decisions.

Most leaders say they want to be data-driven. But in practice, many organizations still use data to confirm what they already believe, delay hard choices, or create the appearance of rigor without real clarity. At the same time, teams are drowning in more information than ever, while AI is making data gathering and analysis faster, cheaper, and easier to commoditize. The harder challenge now is not collecting data — it’s creating the conditions for better decisions.

In this episode, we explore how strategy should be defined in an uncertain world, why customer-centric thinking changes the role of marketing, and how leaders can avoid mistaking metrics for truth. Neil also unpacks customer lifetime value (CLV), the hidden ways metrics get manipulated, and why many companies ask the wrong question when they say they want more data. We also discuss what strategists should focus on as AI changes the work, and why the future advantage may come from decision frameworks, not dashboards.

In this episode we cover:
•Neil’s practical definition of strategy: using resources to stay alive today while improving your position for tomorrow
•Two definitions of marketing — product-centric vs customer-centric — and how the marketer’s role changes in each
•What CLV actually is, why it matters, and how short time horizons distort strategic choices
•Why common metrics (like conversions and engagement) often aren’t comparable across platforms
•The two questions leaders should ask about every KPI: how it’s calculated and how it could be manipulated
•Why smart leaders still ignore data, and how human psychology shapes decision-making
•How to define “how much data is enough” before a decision
•What chief strategy officers can do beyond the annual planning ritual
•Why AI strategy should start with your company’s core strategy — not the other way around

Chapters:

00:01 — Intro + Neil Hoyne

03:10 — The “Last Supper” question

08:10 — Misreading people’s career stories

10:10 — Strategy definition

16:40 — What marketing is

21:05 — Customer-centric thinking

24:10 — CLV basics

30:10 — Why metrics mislead

35:10 — How teams game KPIs

39:20 — Why leaders ignore data

52:00 — How much data is enough?

1:01:20 — Risk, speed, and decisions

1:07:20 — What strategy leaders should do

1:18:10 — New book on careers

1:25:10 — AI noise vs core strategy

1:30:20 — Closing

Additional Resources:

•Neil Hoyne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilhoyne/
•Neil Hoyne website: https://neilhoyne.com/
•Converted (Neil Hoyne’s book): https://www.converted.us/
•Intro (booking 1:1 time; proceeds to charity): https://intro.co/ (search Neil Hoyne on Intro)

Thank you to our guest John Fallon. Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast

John Fallon is the former CEO of Pearson, where he led one of the most challenging digital transformations of any publicly traded company—shifting a legacy publishing giant from selling ~20 million US college textbooks per year to a subscription-driven, digital platform business. This episode was recorded live at LHH’s Executive Exchange Conference in London, and John joins us to share hard-won leadership lessons from the front lines of disruption.

For years we’ve been told only nimble startups survive disruption. But that story misses a quieter truth: most of the Fortune 500 was founded long before the internet—and many incumbents have adapted through multiple platform shifts. In his new book, Resurgent, John (with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School) makes a contrarian case: established organizations can fight back—and even thrive—if they get clear on their enduring value, redesign for transformation, and lead change like the human “contact sport” it is.

In this conversation, John breaks down why disruption often unfolds over decades (not months), how to separate a temporary headwind from a structural shift, and why identifying your company’s true “job to be done” matters more than clinging to any one product. He also shares practical leadership tools for navigating politics, building alignment, empowering middle managers, and sustaining people through prolonged upheaval.

What you’ll learn in this episode
•Why incumbents are often more resilient than we assume—and what the data says
•How to spot the difference between “secular vs structural” change (and why timing is so hard)
•The “job to be done” lens: how Pearson moved from textbooks to learning outcomes
•Why digital transformation is less about tech and more about people, culture, and organizational design
•How to reduce “the meeting after the meeting” and create real disagree-and-commit execution

Episode Timeline

00:00 Welcome to Outthinkers + Live Special Episode Setup

01:22 Why Incumbents Can Win: Pearson’s Transformation & the Book ‘Resurgent’

05:30 Elephants Can Dance: Fortune 500 Resilience and the Myth of Instant Disruption

09:10 Pearson’s Textbook Collapse: Secular vs Structural (and Recency Bias)

11:33 From Textbooks to ‘Job to Be Done’: Purpose, Pricing, and the Access Model

13:45 Crisis Clarifies Identity: Cancer, Core Value, and Avoiding ‘Netflix of X’ Thinking

16:56 Making Purpose Real in Transformation: Profit, Restructuring, and Middle Managers as Shock Absorbers

21:23 Why Digital Transformation Gets Political: Twin-Speed Orgs, Uncertain Disruption, and Staying ‘Busy Being Born’

24:42 Why AI Transformation Is a Human Problem (Linear vs Exponential Change)

26:05 CEO Time: Thinking Space, Contrarian Views & “Disagree and Commit”

28:14 Avoiding the “Meeting After the Meeting”: How to Build Real Alignment

30:17 Audience Q: Leading with Humility—Saying “I Don’t Know” & Showing Humanity

34:08 Should You Take the CEO Job? Confidence, Humility, and Resilience Reserves

36:49 Beyond the Burning Platform: Replatforming, Timing, and Centralize vs Decentralize

41:18 CEO Sounding Boards: CFO/CHRO Partnerships, Board Support, and Staying Grounded

43:35 Culture vs Strategy: The “False Dichotomy” and Building a Learning Organization

45:47 Wrap-Up, Thanks, and Subscribe

Additional Resources
•Resurgent (book): https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/resurgent-9781399422000/
John Fallon on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johnfallonpearson

Thank you to our guest John Fallon. Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast