Felix Oberholzer-Gee is the Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. An award-winning instructor, his academic work has been published in the very best, peer-reviewed journals of his profession. He currently teaches competitive strategy in executive education programs such as the Harvard General Management Program. He also serves as faculty chair of the Senior Executive Leadership Program for China and the Driving Digital Strategy program. He is a cohost of the popular HBR Presents podcast, After Hours. His most recent book Better, Simpler Strategy, Felix is one of the most compelling, complete, and yet, simple strategy books out there. He shows how successful companies that appear to be in very similar businesses – say Home Depot and Lowes - dramatically outperform their rivals. At a time when rapid technological change and global competition conspire to upend traditional ways of doing business, these companies pursue radically simplified strategies focused on value. In this podcast he shares: Why focusing on differentiating our value proposition for customers misses half of the opportunity (we should be equally focused on employees and suppliers).Why we so often confuse “complements” with “substitutes”—for example, we thought music streaming would kill the music business, but it actually had the opposite effect.A simple, immediately-actionable framework design a strategy that maximized the value of your firm.__________________________________________________________________________________________"There are two key ideas: One is value creation for customers, and that is just ways to increase willingness to pay for your customers. Willingness to pay is the most a customer would ever be willing to pay for a product or a service. We want to make sure that we do the kinds of things that increase value where value is the difference between willingness to pay the most the customer is willing to pay verses the actual price for a better camera in your smart phone, and the actual price that we charge."-Felix Oberholzer-Gee__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Felix Oberholzer-Gee + The topic of today’s episode1:54—If you really know me, you know that...2:01—What is your definition of strategy?3:22—What are you most well-known for?5:18—Could you walk us through your framework of what value-based strategy is?10:15—Differentiating your offer to increase willingness to pay13:10—What is the right amount of value to capture?17:40—What is a favorite framework or tool you have?19:50—Applying the value of differentiation to more than just marketing23:00—How should people connect with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Faculty Page at HBS: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=251462LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/felixThank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Liz Wiseman is a researcher and executive advisor who teaches leadership to executives around the world. I first met her in 2010 when she had just published her New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. I’ve been following her work since, as she published The Multiplier Effect and Wall Street Journal bestseller Rookie Smarts. In this podcast we are going to dig into her latest book, Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact. Liz is the CEO of the Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development firm headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Some of her recent clients include: Apple, AT&T, Disney, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Tesla, and Twitter. Liz has been listed on the Thinkers50 ranking and in 2019 was recognized as the top leadership thinker in the world. She has conducted significant research in the field of leadership and collective intelligence and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and a variety of other business and leadership journals. She is a frequent guest lecturer at BYU and Stanford University and is a former executive at Oracle Corporation, where she worked as the Vice President of Oracle University and as the global leader for Human Resource Development. Have you every found yourself in a situation in which you are working hard, feeling overwhelmed, but you realize you are spinning your wheels and not actually having impact? Yet, somehow, there is that person on your team who is able to avoid the distractions, focus on the right things, and make a breakthrough impact?These are called impact players, and Liz has dedicated her last years of research into discovering what makes them unique.In this podcast she shares: What impact players are, and how they differ from othersSecrets of these stellar professionals drawn from a two-year studyThe five mindsets of impact players__________________________________________________________________________________________"In the process of studying leadership and trying to teach this, I came to this realization, and if I've learned anything in my research, it is this: It's not about leadership; it's about contributor-ship. And that is, that people come to work every day desperately wanting to contribute everything they have. When people talk about the experience working for a diminishing leader, they're like, "It was painful, and it was exhausting." Being only able to give 50% of your know-how and capability was exhausting, and demoralizing."-Liz Wiseman__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Liz Wiseman+ The topic of today’s episode2:50—If you really know me, you know that...3:30—What is your definition of strategy?4:22—What are you most well-known for?6:09—Could you give us an example of a habit a diminisher might exhibit unconsciously?8:33—Why did you choose "impact players" as your next area of research?11:01—Clarifying the five practices of impact players 12:20—Figuring out the "job to be done"13:03—Impact players step up and lead14:52—Moving things across the finish16:18—Learning and adapThank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., is President and Chief Executive Officer of SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. With over 300,000 members in 165 countries, SHRM is the largest HR professional association in the world, impacting the lives of 115 million workers every day. As a global leader on the future of employment, culture and leadership, Johnny is a sought-after voice on all matters affecting work, workers and the workplace. He is frequently asked to testify before congress on critical workforce issues and authors the weekly USA Today column, "Ask HR." Johnny’s career spans over 20 years as a lawyer, human resources executive and CEO in both the not-for-profit and for-profit space. He has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/Interactive Corp, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm, and Compass Group USA. He was appointed chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and served as a member of the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board during the Trump Administration. In this episode, it's worth nothing that all of his projections are fact-based, not conjecture, built on a large database of employment data SHRM has been collecting for decades. In this podcast he shares: Some fascinating, counterintuitive insights about Generation Z. Hint: They actually care a lot about money.A breakdown of the macro policy structural barriers that are going to have to be removed if organizations are going to create workplaces that will work in the future Practical, first steps CEOs, Strategists, and leaders can take to begin resetting their culture __________________________________________________________________________________________"I have a shorthand definition of what culture is, and it's how things really work around here. How things get done, not how they should or how you want them to. So number one, and just practical thing I would say to anyone listening is you've got to sit down and you've got to engage in introspection."-Johnny C. Taylor, Jr.__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. + The topic of today’s episode2:28—If you really know me, you know that...2:47—What is your definition of strategy?3:47—Is strategy changing in nature to being made more spontaneously and spread out, and what's causing it?6:02—What are the top one or two shifts in strategy that a strategist or CEO needs to be thinking about?8:44—How would you characterize how Gen Z is different in the way they think about work?12:00—What can strategists and CEOs to rethink the way that the definition or a 'worker' is changing?15:01—How can a strategist or CEO if their company needs a cultural reset?16:42—Among all the frameworks on culture, what's your go-to first step or driver in shifting culture?18:42—How can people connect and keep learning from you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:SHRM Website: https://www.shrm.org/PThank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Pete Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping and purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, including telecom, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. He’s the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and co-authored The Customer Centricity Playbook with Sarah Toms.Pete co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded and continues to run Theta Equity Partners to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation," a simple but powerful idea, that you can value any company by adding up the value of its individual customers. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching accomplishments. Among these achievements, he was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers” in 2017, and was the only academic on the list. In this podcast he shares: What customer lifetime value is, and why it should be the central driver of your strategy A challenge to the idea that you should treat all customers equally well The first set of steps you should take to begin becoming a truly customer-centric business __________________________________________________________________________________________"Of the portfolio things we sell, here's the next thing that you should buy. That's not customer centricity. I mean, it can be if they love us, and they really do want to buy all of our things in sequence, but in a lot of cases, that's not the way it works. So it really is figuring out who are those valuable customers? And what are their broader wants and needs beyond just the stuff that we sell to them?"-Pete Fader__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Pete Fader + The topic of today’s episode2:05—If you really know me, you know that...2:38—What is your definition of strategy?3:21—What are you most known for?4:37—Could you define customer centricity?6:00—What's a company that models being customer-centric well?9:15—How do you identify who the most valuable customers are? 15:05—Can B2B companies apply these principles as well? 17:57—What's something that you've changed your mind about?19:05—What last thoughts do you want to leave us with?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Twitter: https://twitter.com/faderpLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com › peterfaderFaculty Page: https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/peter-fader/Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Professor Richard D'Aveni is the Bakala Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. He is considered one of the premier competitive strategists of his time. His research looks for the winning competitive strategies used by corporations, governments, and militaries. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and Forbes and is a frequent commentator on strategic and technological developments. Fortune Magazine has described Professor D’Aveni as modern-day Sun-Tzu, the ancient Chinese master of the strategic arts. Marketing News says, “Today's Internet marketers’ worship at the competitive altar of D'Aveni.” Thinkers50 awarded him its 2017 Strategy Award, and nominated him for the 2019 Breakthrough Ideas Award. He has since been inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, along with Peter Drucker, Clay Christensen, and many other groundbreaking innovators. His diverse background includes a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, as well as a law degree and MBA, bringing a unique perspective into business. His most recent book, The Pan-Industrial Revolution, examined the impact of 3D printing on manufacturing, global competition, and society. In this podcast he shares: The idea that most of us are grossly underestimating the impact of 3D printing on business and global economy An argument for why in the near future assembly lines—the corner stone of manufacturing since the industrial evolution—won’t matter Why Michael Porter's theories might be misplaced in an era of hypercompetition__________________________________________________________________________________________"You know, life is about temporary advantages, not about sustainable advantages. Those days are gone with the 1950s and ‘60s. So that's hypercompetition in a nutshell."-Richard D'Aveni__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Richard D'Aveni + The topic of today’s episode2:48—If you really know me, you know that...3:33—What is your definition of strategy?5:33—Could you summarize your concept of hypercompetition?8:28—What do people get wrong when it comes to 3D printing?11:39—How will Wall Street be impacted by the adoption of 3D printing?14:00—Are there any capabilities or strengths that incumbents can realistically hold on to to keep ahead?16:58—What's the next shift in strategy; what should leadership in strategists be focusing on?18:22—How can people find you or follow you and learn from you? __________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Direct line to his office at Dartmouth: 603-646-2921Personal Website: http://daveni.tuck.dartmouth.edu/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-d-aveni-5169749/Most recent book: http://daveni.tuck.dartmouth.edu/reseaThank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Dr. Alexander (Alex) Osterwalder is one of the world’s most influential innovation experts, a leading author, entrepreneur, and in-demand speaker whose work has changed the way established companies do business and how new ventures get started. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide, Alex is known for simplifying the strategy development process and turning complex concepts into digestible visual tools. Together with Yves Pigneur, he invented the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map—practical tools that are trusted by millions of business practitioners from leading global companies. And they really introduced into the strategy dialogue the idea that business models can be intentionally—and creatively—designed. Strategyzer, Alex’s company, is on a mission to evolve large established companies so that they inspire and activate and liberate their employees to be innovators. They do this using online courses, applications, and technology-enabled platforms. His books include the international bestseller Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, The Invincible Company, and the recently launched High-Impact Tools for Teams.In this podcast he shares: Why innovation MUST begin with your culture Why if there were only ONE metric you should be tracking to unleash innovation, it should be your “innovation kill rate” Real-world examples of large enterprises who have been able to transform into agile, innovate organizations, proving it CAN be done __________________________________________________________________________________________"So there are now those outliers who have done exactly that. They invested in innovation, but it's not just the money, they gave innovation power and they created this ecosystem for exploration, with tons of failures. They hold up their failures—same thing as Amazon. They hold up their failures and say, "You can't succeed without failures, and the bigger you get, the bigger your failures. But you know that's the system you need to create for the winners to emerge. So, failure's never the goal, but it's an inevitable side consequence of exploration."-Alex Osterwalder__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Alex Osterwalder + The topic of today’s episode2:05—What is your definition of strategy?3:01—What got you interested in strategy?4:01—Could you explain a "dual culture"?5:50—What are the drivers of culture?8:09—What are you most well-known for?11:16—What should a CEO be encouraging to engage innovative behavior?14:30—What is the key lesson people should take away from the case studies you've described?16:20—What do most companies get wrong?18:07—What's a belief that you've changed your mind about?19:54—What are you working on now, and how can people engage with you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Personal website: https://www.alexosterwalder.com/Strategyzer Website: Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Chris Marquis is the Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at the Cornell University Johnson College of Business. Prior to joining Cornell, he worked for 10 years at Harvard Business School and has held visiting positions at Harvard Kennedy School, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, Fudan University, and Shanghai Jiaotong University. Chris received a PhD in sociology and business administration from the University of Michigan. These research projects build on Chris’ earlier research on how business can have a positive impact on society and in particular how historical and geographical processes have shaped firms’ and entrepreneurs’ social and environmental strategies and activities. He is one of the foremost authorities today on the intersection of corporate social responsibility and strategy. His latest book, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism, focuses on the potential for stakeholder governance models to reform capitalism. Chris believes that businesses have a big role to play in a capitalist society. In this podcast he shares: Why corporations need to pursue both positive social impact and profit—and why we no longer get to choose A fascinating concept called “Universal Ownership Theory,” that could explain why suddenly (seemingly) corporations are awakening to this need A practical first step you can help to help your company start embracing multi-stakeholder approach __________________________________________________________________________________________"This is where I think the strategist is so important because something like a 'net zero commitment' is easy to say, but actually how to get there is a lot harder. And I think that's where strategy can play a really big role is actually in ways of transforming the company to meet a bold and important objective, like being net zero."-Chris Marquis__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Chris Marquis + The topic of today’s episode2:10—If you really know me, you know that...2:40—What is your definition of strategy?3:08—What got you interested in strategy?3:44—What are you most well-known for?4:29—Can you describe a B corp for us?5:13—Why is it valuable for a company or strategy to be looking at this type of strategic rationale?6:08—Why do you think the ESG and B Corp movement is happening now?7:38—Can you help shatter the myth that B Corps must be socially-driven, small entrepreneurial entities?10:22—What have you changed your mind about with regard to B Corps?11:13—Is there a set of tools, leverage points or framework a strategist can look at to align the company behind multi-stakeholder benefit?12:51—Where do you see the future relationship of corporations and stakeholders in society? 14:13—What do you think should be the first steps and agenda for a strategist looking to implement these ideas into their company?15:43—Of all the strategic advice you've ever gotten, what has been most impactful for you?16:35—Could you tell us about "Universal Ownership Theory"?Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Robbie Kellman Baxter is a consultant, author and speaker. She is also the author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction, and hosts the podcast Subscription Stories. Robbie has more than 20 years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations, including Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft and Consumer Reports and has worked in or consulted to clients in more than twenty industries. She has been focused on subscription and growth strategies for the past decade and coined the popular business term “Membership Economy," which is now being used by organizations and journalists around the country and beyond.  Robbie has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She earned her MBA from the Stanford GSB, and graduated with honors from Harvard College. In this podcast she shares: Why you should consider evolving your business model from a transaction-based one into a membership-based one What she learned from working with Netflix and other member-based companies across a range of industries Why evolving into a membership model is not just about changing your pricing structure, but requires you also looking at making three others sets of changes __________________________________________________________________________________________"You have to think about the impact on the products that you offer, the processes that you use internally, the metrics that you educate your leadership and your board to focus on all of that needs to change as well. If you're [moving toward a membership model], it's not as simple as taking the products you have and slapping a subscription price on it."-Robbie Baxter__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Robbie Baxter + The topic of today’s episode2:00—If you really know me, you know that...2:31—What is your definition of strategy?4:31—What got you interested in strategy?5:51—What are you most well-known for?7:53—Can you paint a picture for us of how a business could become a membership economy business?11:43— What is the key lesson or takeaway from your work?13:09—How do you align your metrics, business processes and products to a membership economy model?14:30—Can you be both transactional and subscription, or do you have to choose between two worlds?15:54—Of all the strategic advice that you've gotten, what has been most impactful?17:04—Where can people connect with you and what are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Subscription Stories podcast: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/podcast-2/Personal website: https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbiekellmanbaxter/Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

April Rinne is a “change navigator,” speaker, investor, and adventurer whose work and travels in more than 100 countries have given her a front-row seat to a world in flux. She is one of the 50 leading female futurists in the world, a Harvard Law School graduate, a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, and a Fulbright Scholar. She is also a trusted advisor to well-known startups and companies, financial institutions, nonprofits, think tanks, and governments worldwide. Earlier in life she was a global development executive, an international microfinance lawyer, and a hiking guide. She spent nearly four years traveling solo (with a backpack and a shoestring budget) to better understand how to help shape a more inclusive, equitable world. From her varied and vast experiences, she developed her concept of Flux—how to adopt a mindset that thrives in our world's pace of constant change. In this episode, she'll share with us the eight mental shifts you need to make to thrive in a state of constant change, and why you should not try to run fast, but instead run slower.__________________________________________________________________________________________"The flux mindset, you just nailed it, because one of the ways I'll define it is: It is the state of mind or the ability to see every change whether it's good or bad, loved or hated, unwelcomed or unexpected as an opportunity, as a means of growing and improving even the hard stuff, it’s not a threat but to be able to harness those silver linings."-April Rinne__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing April + The topic of today’s episode1:48—If you really know me, you know that...2:15—What is your definition of strategy?2:53—What got you interested in strategy?3:47—Could you describe the flux mindset?5:00—Why does a strategist need to get their head around to build their awareness about a flux mindset?5:48— Can an organization or a sector or community also have a mindset? 7:09—What's the right perspective to approach flux from?9:18—Could you explain the concept of slowing down, even if the world is accelerating?11:14—What are some of the other eight superpowers that we should be mindful of?13:30—Could you tell us more about the superpower of scenario planning?15:10—What do people usually get wrong?16:52—What's some advice or something you wish you had learned earlier?19:28—Where can people find you and connect with you and learn from you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Flux website: https://fluxmindset.com/what-is-a-flux-mindsetPersonal website: https://aprilrinne.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprilrinne/Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

David Ulrich is a Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and the Co-Director of Michigan's Human Resource Executive Program. He is one of the most influential thought-leaders in the area of HR, organizational design, and leadership having written over 30 books on those topics. His teaching and research address the question: How do people create organizations that add value for customers? Dave studies how organizations change, build capabilities, learn, remove boundaries and leverage human resources activities. He is known for continually learning, turning complex ideas into simple solutions, and creating real value to those he works with in three fields: organization, leadership and human resources. In this podcast episode, Dave will share his insights on changing culture while aligning it with your organization as a whole. He'll discuss what it really means to give value (and to whom it's most important), what some common misconceptions are when innovating for value, and how to build your organization for these aspects.__________________________________________________________________________________________"Yes, we've got to have great talent, people, workforce, but even more, we've got to have a great organization. And if we don't create the right organization, the workplace, and the culture, we're not going to be successful. Individuals can be champions, but teams win championships"-Dave Ulrich__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Dave Ulrich + The topic of today’s episode2:09—If you really know me, you know that...2:40—What is your definition of strategy?4:30—What are you most known for?6:36—What should people do to implement the idea that value is all about how it's perceived by others?8:08—Is there a set of tools or checklist of drivers to look at to shape the organization?11:22— What do people get wrong?14:21—What's something you've changed your mind about?17:10—What are some resources or a place to start for companies looking to make the first steps?18:04—What are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveulrichpro/Latest Book: http://hrfromtheoutsidein.com/Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast