Ash Fontana became one of the most recognized startup investors in the world after launching online investing at AngelList. He then became a Managing Director of Zetta, the first investment fund that focused on AI. The firm was the lead investor in category-defining AI companies such as Kaggle, Domino, Tractable, Lilt and Invenia. He has appeared in Fast Company, Bloomberg, Forbes, CNBC and at the UN. Ash previously co-founded Topguest, a Founders Fund-backed company that built customer analytics technology for companies like United, Virgin, and InterContinental. Topguest sold in an eight-figure transaction 18 months after the company was founded. From his experiences, he’s written his first book, The AI-First Company, the definitive playbook to putting AI first in every business conversation. The playbook is an executable guide for applying AI to business problems, made for real companies, with real budgets, that need strategies and tactics to effectively implement AI. In this podcast, we’ll dive into the topics from his book and really understand how you can apply these concepts to infuse AI in your organization. Ash will share with us why the concept we often hold about AI—a big brain in the sky—isn't accurate, and how we should be thinking of AI. He'll also define what it means to be an “AI-First company” and lead us through practical steps you can take now to start moving your organization on the path being an AI leader.__________________________________________________________________________________________"[AI] is very good at discrete things like making the same decision over and over again, very reliably with a predictable output or making very rational decisions or whatnot. So, I think it's important to just remember it's different from our form of intelligence. And that's why it's important to develop, because if it was the same why would we be bothering with all this."-Ash Fontana__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:01:06—Introducing Ash Fontana + The topic of today’s episode3:06—What is an AI-first company?4:49—How do you describe AI?5:50—Is AI less adaptable than humans at making decisions when the parameters or underlying ideas suddenly shift?7:16—Could you explain how flywheel concept as it relates to AI systems?9:08—How would a legacy or incumbent company approach where to start with AI?10:59—How can a company shift from a lean approach to being "all in"?13:14— What is some of the languages or some of the words that we need to start learning to grasp AI?14:49—What do companies most often get wrong when seeking to prioritize AI? 17:10—What are some resources or a place to start for companies looking to make the first steps?19:20—Where can we find you?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashfontana/The AI-First Company(Book)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

Tendayi Viki is an author and corporate innovation expert. As Associate Partner at Strategyzer, he helps companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has written three books: Pirates In The Navy, The Corporate Startup and The Lean Product Lifecycle. He previously served as Director of Product Lifecycle at Pearson, where he co-developed an innovation framework that won the Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York. Tendayi has been shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award and was named on the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List for emerging management thinkers to watch. He is also a regular contributor at Forbes. In this episode, Tendayi discusses with Kaihan why innovation has to follow strategy and how you can become a pirate in the Navy (or an employee entrepreneur) to create new innovative solutions.__________________________________________________________________________________________"One of my pet peeves is when I meet heads of innovation and they say, 'My job is to let a thousand flowers bloom. There's no such thing as a bad idea.'and I just think that it sounds good in a sense that you want to democratize innovation, and yet it's very rare that I've ever found any innovation that is succeeded without some strategic connection."-Tendayi Viki__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Tendaya Viki + The topic of today’s episode1:20—If you really know me, you know that...2:04—What is your definition of strategy?3:07—What got you interested in strategy?5:13—Which comes first—strategy or letting ideas bloom?6:18—What would you say you're most known for?8:15—What story best illustrates why your concept is so important?9:47—Could you explain your concept of "Pirates in the Navy?"12:09—What framework or idea has been most impactful for you?12:56—What's your favorite framework or tool that you like to use?14:40—What are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Tendayi's BooksThank 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

Whitney is the CEO of human capital consultancy WLJ Advisors, a2020 Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private company in America. She is an expert at helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals, and recognized as one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (#14) as named by Thinkers50. Having worked at Fortune 100 companies, been an award-winning equity analyst on Wall Street, invested with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, and coached alongside the renowned Marshall Goldsmith, Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach–––all of which she brings to her work in coaching CEOs and C-Suite executives. Whitney works with high-growth, venture-backed start-ups and Fortune 100 companies across a variety of sectors including consumer goods, technology, higher education and financial services. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. She is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, and frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than one million times. In this podcast...Whitney shares with us how to apply disruption theory to your career and your life, why sometimes it is a smart move to step back in order to get onto a faster growth curve, and why doing that is often so difficult (and it's not just because of what is going on your mind, but because of what others around you are thinking.)__________________________________________________________________________________________"With people around us, what we have to remember is that whenever you disrupt yourself, you are disrupting the people around you, your disruption precipitates, their disruption."-Whitney Johnson__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Whitney Johnson + The topic of today’s episode3:01—If you really know me, you know that...3:35—What is your definition of strategy?4:08—What got you interested in strategy?4:50—What would you say you are most known for?5:34—How does the traditional concept of the J curve apply to one's own career?7:25—How then does the S curve apply to people's persona life and career?9:30—Where does "following your gut" fit into all of this?10:40—Why is it so hard to disrupt yourself?12:10—What would you say to someone who's scared of losing their identity in disrupting themselves?14:49—What are other aspects that hold people back from personal disruption?15:54—What do people usually get wrong?16:12—What's one of the most important things that you've changed your mind about?17:47—What's been most impactful for you or something maybe you wish you'd learned earlier?18:41—What are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources: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 Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he leads the IEM and EPGM programs. He is one of the most experienced Faculty Directors at MIT, having directed executive programs for dozens of companies over the past 15 years. From 2014 through 2017, David was the host of Innovation Navigation, a weekly radio show and podcast that focuses on the management of innovation. Each week he interviewed thought leaders from industry and academia. David is the author of the award-winning book about LEGO’s near-bankruptcy and spectacular recovery—Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. He has published articles in Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, The Financial Times, and many other business journals. For the past couple of decades, David has focused his work around innovation and disruption. His most recent book, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation, is largely based on his findings in which he discusses how innovation is limited in its scope, understanding and definition. Rather being a sudden discovery, it’s often about rethinking how you work the products and solutions you already have to better meet seemingly incremental customer pain points. In this episode, David discusses with Kaihan why we should be focusing small innovations rather that big, industry changing ones, why Steve Job’s was not a disruptor (at least not intentionally), and the approach to innovation that allows Lego to transform from near bankruptcy to supremacy, and that enabled CarMax, Gatorade, Disney, and USAA to out-innovate their competition.__________________________________________________________________________________________"But too often, we put so much time, effort, and expense. All the cool kids go work on the disruptive revolutionary projects. And we ignore those things that made us great, we forget to honor the things that the company did to make itself great that our customers still depend on us for and that, in terms of what we know how to do and the people we've hired, that we're not just going to do yesterday and today, but we're going to continue to do tomorrow." -David Robertson__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing David Robertson + The topic of today’s episode2:32—If you really know me, you know that...4:23—What is your definition of strategy or innovation?5:55—What got you interested in innovation?6:41—What would you say that you're most known for? 10:26—The mis-told myth of Steve Jobs as a disruptor15:57—What would be one key lesson you'd want people to take away from The Power of Little Ideas?17:08—What is the most impactful advice you've ever received?18:30—What are you working on now + how to connect with David__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy 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

Along with a varied background with a degree in psychology from Duke and a PdD in Physics from Harvard, David Duncan has also worked at career at McKinsey & Company, then Innosight, and collaborated with Clayton Christensen on Competing Against Luck. This has given him a systems perspective and the ability to really understand customers from a unique lens.He is also the co-author of two other books and a number of influential articles, including a groundbreaking book which introduced a simple yet profound idea: customers don’t buy products and services; they hire them to do a job. Building a Growth Factory," co-authored with Scott Anthony, and the Harvard Business Review articles, “Knowing When to Reinvent” and “Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days."In this episode, David discusses with Kaihan why so many companies, business leaders, and strategists mistake the reasons their customers buy from them, and why this can be fatal, why focusing on jobs to be done can help you avoid this trap, and why you should start with “small data” before your you get to “big data."__________________________________________________________________________________________"Because oftentimes, the most useful aspects of [customer] conversations are unexpected, and they ramble around a little bit, often into the rambling that leads to the greatest insights. And when you see one done well, it often seems a little chaotic and even not that helpful until you learn the underlying principles that were guiding the interview, and that were guiding the insights that they got out of it. "-David Duncan__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing David Duncan + The topic of today’s episode2:02—If you really know me, you know that...2:39—What got you interested in strategy?4:32—What is your definition of strategy?6:14—You come at problems with this multi-point solution look, can you tell us a little bit about that?10:03—Explain to us the concept of your new book, The Secret Lives of Customers12:30—Writing the book in an unorthodox format from a detective's perspective16:12—Thinking of customers in the concept of "jobs to be done"17:25—Big data versus qualitative research19:10—How to connect with David__________________________________________________________________________________________Additional Resources:www.marketdetective.comThank 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

Navi Radjou is a New York-based innovation and leadership scholar who advises senior executives worldwide on breakthrough growth strategies. A Fellow at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, Navi has served as vice president at Forrester Research. In 2013, Navi won the prestigious Thinkers50 Innovation Award—given to a management thinker who is re-shaping the way we think about and practice innovation. He delivered a talk at TED Global 2014 on frugal innovation which has over 2 million views. Navi co-authored Frugal Innovation: How To Do Better With Less, as well as the global bestseller Jugaad Innovation (over 250,000 copies sold worldwide) and From Smart To Wise. He is working on his next book Conscious Society: Redefining Who We Are, Reinventing How We Consume, Work, Relate, and Live. In this podcast, Navi discusses with Kaihan what we can do to reinvent how business is done—concepts like frugal innovation and focusing on a regenerative economy—both aimed at making the most of the resources we have to affect a larger social impact. He'll also talk about recovering from Covid-19 in a 'Y' pattern rather than a 'V' as many tend to, and the new opportunities that can create.__________________________________________________________________________________________"So, this is...what regeneration is about. It's essentially going from the old notion of sustainability, which was all about doing less harm, to doing more consciously, to have a more positive impact on the environment, but also the society."-Navi Radjou__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Navi Radjou + The topic of today’s episode2:13—If you really know me, you know that...2:43—What is your definition of strategy?6:15—The 'Y' shaped recovery vs. 'V' shaped recovery path11:46—Is technology and crowdsourcing creating a drive for a multi-stakeholder approach?14:48—Digging into the "Regenerative Economy" concept17:31—The concept of "Frugal Innovation"19:36—What should strategists do now? __________________________________________________________________________________________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

John Hagel has had a prosperous 40-year career in the Silicon Valley world. Through it, he's learned firsthand how quickly things can change, and how easy it is for companies to fall behind when they lose sight of this.John has experience as a management consultant, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. As a partner from McKinsey & Company, he helped open up their Silicon Valley office and launched two new practices as a partner at Deloitte and established the Center for the Edge after recently retiring. He recently published his new book The Journey Beyond Fear that addresses the psychology of change, which will be accompanied by a series of programs to help people navigate through change and many levels. John is also a faculty member at Singularity University, where he speaks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. John has several bestselling books under his name, including, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of The Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge and is widely published in major business publications, including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal among many others. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best article and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Businessweek.In this episode, John shares two of his most important concepts, "zoom out, zoom in," and "scaling from the edge." Each will transform the mental model by which you think about strategy. He argues that we are indeed facing a big shift in business. He'll also unpack insights from his latest book, The journey Beyond Fear, which in the words of Dan Pink shows "how to move past fear to improve performance and deepen meeting."__________________________________________________________________________________________"If you zoom out 10 to 20 years—and you understand exponential change—and you think you're going to be the same business that you are today, go back to the table. You haven't figured out what makes leaders out of their comfort zone."-John Hagel__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing John Hagel + The topic of today’s episode2:33—If you really know me, you know that...3:20—What is your definition of strategy?4:23—What got you interested in strategy?5:08—What are your big strategic ideas that people have adopted?5:36—"Zoom out, Zoom in" explained8:45—More on "Scaling from the Edge"10:55—What are you seeing now that is changing the way organizations need to strategize or lead or function?12:25—How fear drives people15:17—The "Passion of the Explorer" concept17:20—What has been the most impactful piece of advice you've received?18:45—What are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________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

Few people have a pulse on the world like Ram Charan does. Ram is an award-winning professor from Harvard and Wharton and a worldwide expert on business strategy, execution, corporate governance and building high-performance organizations. He sits on seven corporate boards and has worked with the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies, including GE, Bank of America, Verizon, Coca-Cola, 3M, Merck, Aditya Birla Group and Tata Group. He is the author or coauthor of 32 books, four of them best sellers, including Execution and Confronting Reality. His latest book is Rethinking Competitive Advantage. Ram is known for cutting through the complexity of running a business in today’s fast-changing environment to uncover the core business problem. His work takes him around the globe non-stop and gives him an unparalleled, up-to-date insider view of the challenges and trends from inside the boardrooms leading companies. In this conversation he lays out what you, as a strategist, should be focusing on now, including: why you should focus on cash, not earnings, why the smartest companies have stopped doing strategic planning and what they are doing instead, and what it takes to change the mindset of your CEO, to get them to embrace the customer-centric, digital-first perspective your future will depend on.__________________________________________________________________________________________"We used to say...strategy first, and then do the execution. That was the case. It's over. Strategy and execution now run simultaneously.""Digitizing is not expensive. Not doing, is very expensive."-Ram Charan__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Ram Charan + The topic of today’s episode2:00—If you really knew me, you know that...2:55—What is your definition of strategy?4:40—Why focus on cash, not earnings per share8:03—A bit on Execution, and what Ram learned about execution in writing this book9:30—The importance of external audits10:30—What to say to the excuse, "I don't have time."11:15—How algorithms are changing business models14:42—How organizational structures change because of algorithms16:00—What are the implications of tech giving us the ability to access a global market?17:00—How do you approach creating a mindset shift from the top in a company?19:05—What are you working on now?__________________________________________________________________________________________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

Disruptive innovation is a term heard around every corner these days. But our default way of thinking about it may have holes in it. In this episode, Michael Raynor discusses a new way of looking at it, in addition to other timely topics.Michael is a Managing Director with Deloitte LLP where he is part of the team working on developing and implementing Deloitte’s two-track response to the global climate crisis. The first track focuses on reducing and eventually eliminating the firm’s carbon emissions, while the second track comprises a portfolio of efforts designed to mobilize larger ecosystems of organizations—commercial enterprises, NGOs, governments, etc.—to generate an impact on the scale of the problem. His book "The Strategy Paradox" (2007) was named by Strategy + Business as one of its top five picks in strategy, and BusinessWeek named it one of that year’s 10 Best Business Books. Michael co-authored The Innovator’s Solution with the late Clayton Christensen and collaborated extensively with Christensen over the years. Another of his books, The Innovator's Manifesto, released in 2011, became a Canadian bestseller, which prompted the Financial Times to call Raynor, "one of the most articulate and interesting of…strategists.” In addition to discussing the discussing what people assume wrongly about disruptive innovation, Michael also leads us through understanding his concept of the "Strategy Paradox," and to understand the urgency of climate change and what our role is within this near future.__________________________________________________________________________________________I'm of a mind that although there's obviously an appropriately increasing awareness and concern about the climate crisis, I continue to believe that for the most part, we have really not come to terms with the urgency and severity of the problem face.""So you're disruptive as a consequence of your impact on an industry rather than you are disruptive as a consequence of the way in which you have attempted to have an impact. And that's a critically important distinction because what it means is that disruptive innovations are not necessarily successful."-Michael Raynor__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Michael Raynor + The main idea of today’s episode2:00—If you really knew me, you know that...2:38—What is your definition of strategy?3:31—Explaining the concept of tradeoffs6:15—What got you interested in strategy?9:07—What are you most known for?9:50—What are the most important things strategists should know about your work?12:50—How should the climate question be incorporated into strategy?16:28—Are we past the point of remedying the global climate change crisis?17:43—What can a company do to start engaging productively in whatever ecosystem they're in to this common cause?20:00—Concluding remarks__________________________________________________________________________________________Resources Mentioned: The InnovaThank 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

Innovations aren't born overnight, and we already know that. What many overlook is the idea that you don't have to have big changes in order to be innovative; some of the best out there were born out of a succession of small steps toward it. In this episode Kaihan welcomes Josh Linkner, a Creative Troublemaker passionately a believer that all human beings have incredible creative capacity, and he’s on a mission to unlock inventive thinking and creative problem solving to help leaders, individuals, and communities soar. Josh has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for a combined value of over $200 million and is the author of four books including the New York Times Bestsellers, Disciplined Dreaming and The Road to Reinvention. He has invested in and/or mentored over 100 startups and is the Founding Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. Today, Josh serves as Chairman and co-founder of Platypus Labs, an innovation research, training, and consulting firm. He has twice been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and is the recipient of the United States Presidential Champion of Change Award. In this episode he breaks down why we should focus on “little” innovation breakthroughs rather than big ones and some practical steps to unlock innovation in your employees.__________________________________________________________________________________________"I think as leaders, because I know we have a lot of leaders listening, it's critical for us to create the conditions that foster creativity. If you think about like a greenhouse what is the optimal conditions for plants to grow. We as leaders probably need to be thinking about creating a greenhouse to nurture and grow the creative capacity of our team."We're often told that innovation only counts if it's a billion-dollar idea, where only certain rules can be innovative, like unless you're wearing a lab coat or a hoodie, forget about it. This is the opposite. It's sort of like innovation for the rest of us. And it encourages people not to take giant, highly-risky moonshot swings, but rather to cultivate high-velocity, high-volume of small micro-innovations, daily acts of creativity."-Josh Linkner__________________________________________________________________________________________Episode Timeline:00:00—Introducing Josh Linkner + The topic of today’s episode1:34—If you really knew me, you know that...2:43—What is your definition of strategy?3:52—What got you interested in strategy?4:28—What would you say you're most known for?5:30—The founding the unicorn company StockX6:10—"Big Little Breakthroughs" explained7:53—Examples of little innovations that have had a big impact11:18—What's something that you believed in that you've changed your mind on?12:38—Can you give us some practical tips or ideas on what we can do to empower greater employee-led innovation?14:08—What is one takeaways from this discussion?__________________________________________________________________________________________Resources Mentioned:Big Little Breakthroughs - Josh LinknerThank 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