This week, we are sharing with you the 2021 shortlisted nominees for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, in partnership with Fujitsu.

1: Scott Anthony, Paul Cobban, Natalie Painchaud & Andy Parker

Scott Anthony, Paul Cobban, Natalie Painchaud and Andy Parker are the authors of Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization (HBR Press, 2020).

Scott Anthony is a senior partner in Innosight’s Singapore office, where he helps leaders design new growth strategies, build innovation capabilities, navigate disruptive innovation, and manage strategic transformation. Scott has written eight books, including Dual Transformation (2017), which describes how forward-thinking organizations can navigate disruptive change and own the future.

Paul Cobban is DBS Chief Data and Transformation Officer where he has helmed the cultural, digital, and data transformation that secured for DBS the distinction of being recognised as the World’s Best Bank for three years in a row.

Natalie Painchaud is the director of learning at Innosight and has extensive experience helping Fortune 500 companies develop the strategies, capabilities, and early proof points required to successfully innovate. She is also the co-author of the Harvard Business Review article “Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation”.

Andy Parker is a partner at Innosight and its Asia-Pacific practice leader. Andy has over fifteen years of strategy and innovation consulting experience, having led numerous engagements for multinational clients across multiple industries. Prior to joining Innosight, Andy was a member of Accenture’s Global Strategy Group.

2: Christian Busch

Christian Busch directs the CGA Global Economy Program at New York University, and also teaches at the London School of Economics. Previously, he co-directed the LSE’s Innovation Lab and co-founded the Sandbox Network, a global community of young innovators, as well as Leaders on Purpose, an organization convening purpose-driven leaders of Fortune 500 companies. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Forum, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and among Diplomatic Courier’s “Top 99 Influencers”. His book, The Serendipity Mindset (Penguin Random House, 2020), was described as “wise, exciting, and life-changing” by Arianna Huffington.

3: Rahaf Harfoush

Rahaf Harfoush is a strategist, digital anthropologist and author who focuses on the intersections of emerging technology, innovation, and digital culture. Rahaf is the executive director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture. She teaches Innovation & Emerging Business Models at Sciences Po’s school of Management and Innovation in Paris. Rahaf is a member of France’s National Digital Council, a visiting policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and was named a Young Global Changer at the G20 Think Tank Summit. Formerly, she was the associate director of the Technology Pioneer Programme at the World Economic Forum. Rahaf is the author of Yes We Did (New Riders, 2009) which provides an inside look on how social media built the Obama brand, The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers (Portfolio, 2014) and Hustle & Float: Reclaim your Creativity and Thrive in World Obsessed with Work (Diversion Books, 2019).

4: Amantha Imber

Amantha Imber is an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioural science consultancy Inventium. She is also the co-creator of the Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies list and the AFR BOSS Best Places to Work list. Amantha has helped companies such as Google, Apple, Disney, LEGO, Atlassian, Commonwealth Bank and many others innovate more successfully and reinvent the way they approach their work. In 2019, Amantha was named as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. Amantha is also the host of the number one ranking business podcast How I Work, which has had over 2 million downloads, where she interviews some of the world’s leading innovators about their habits, rituals and strategies for structuring their day.  Amantha is the author of The Creativity Formula (Liminal Press, 2009) and The Innovation Formula (Wiley, 2016).

5: Stefanie K. Johnson

Stefanie K. Johnson is an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. Her research is focused on the intersection of leadership and diversity and she works with companies to implement evidence-based practices to reduce unconscious bias and increase inclusion. Stefanie is a member of the MG 100 Coaches, was selected for the 2020 Thinkers50 Radar List, and is the author of Inclusify: Harnessing the power of uniqueness and belonging to build innovative teams (Harper Business, 2020). She has presented her work at over 170 meetings around the world including at the White House for a 2016 summit on diversity in corporate America. 

6: David Schonthal & Loran Nordgren

David Schonthal and Loran Nordgren are the authors of The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas (Wiley, 2021).

David Schonthal is Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and faculty director of Kellogg’s Zell Fellows Program. David is a senior director of business design at IDEO, an operating partner at 7Wire Ventures, a venture partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital and a global advisor at Design for Ventures (D4V), a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in design-led Japanese startups.

Loran Nordgren is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. The overarching goal of his work is to advance psychological theory and to use theory-driven insights to develop decision strategies, structured interventions, and policy recommendations that improve decision-making and well-being. He has received the Theoretical Innovation Award in experimental psychology and is a former Fulbright Scholar.

7: Martin Reeves & Jack Fuller

Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller are the authors of The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future (HBR Press, 2021).

Martin Reeves is chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute. He is a managing director and senior partner in BCG’s San Francisco office. Martin joined BCG in London in 1989 and later moved to Tokyo, where he was responsible for BCG’s business with Western clients. His consulting career has focused on strategy – with equal emphasis on idea origination and development, and application by consulting with clients on their strategy challenges. He is the co-author of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (HBR Press, 2015). 

Jack Fuller is the founder of Casati Health, a company reimagining mental and physical health care. Previously, he was a special project manager at BCG in New York and a member of the BCG Henderson Institute where he published on imagination, goals, purpose, strategy games, and transformation. As a consultant at BCG, Jack worked with clients on brand strategy, customer journey mapping, and innovation in products and services.

8: Tendayi Viki

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 (Unbound, 2020), The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems (with Esther Gons and Dan Toma, Vakmedianet, 2017) and The Lean Product Lifecycle (with  Craig Strong, Pearson, 2018). He was previously 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. Tendayi was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2017 and was named on the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes.

About Our Partner for the Innovation Award

Fujitsu is passionate about using technology to create a more inclusive, sustainable and trusted future. It drives everything they do. Throughout their history, they’ve supported businesses and society through delivering robust and reliable IT systems.

Recipients will be announced at the Thinkers50 Awards Gala 2021 on 15-16 November 2021.

Table of Contents

Preface
Ricardo Viana Vargas

Introduction
Sunil Prashara

What it means to emerge stronger
Scott D. Anthony

Transformation takes a team – here’s what the best ones have in common
David Burkus

Four lessons for innovating in a crisis
Jane Thoning Callesen

Seizing new value pools in a post-pandemic world
Sangeet Paul Choudary

Planning meets agility
Alessandro Di Fiore

Pandemic meets digital transformation
Karolin Frankenberger, Hannah Mayer, Andreas Reiter, and Markus Schmidt

People strategy for successful strategies
Claudio Garcia

The Covid-led acceleration of the shift from brawn to brain
Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava

Make sure your lungs are working properly (and may the Force be with you!)
Anna Hummel-Gumaelius

Winning the fight and winning the future by leading with purpose and meaning
Perry Keenan, Jeanne Kwong Bickford, Michelle Stohlmeyer Russell, Marin Gjaja, and Connor Currier

Why transformation is a team sport
Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo

Changing how we change – a practical guide to leading virtual transformation beyond the crisis
Susie Kennedy and Andrew Bray

Saving lives by transforming health systems in the time of Covid-19
Sanjay Kurani, Clifford Wang, and Behnam Tabrizi

The story of Haier’s Chinese U-Vaccine
Bram van der Lecq

A citizen revolution will help accelerate the transformation of businesses in the post-crisis era
Alwin Magimay

A new catalyst for digital transformation
Frank Palermo

Six questions to ask before starting a transformation

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez and Whitney Johnson

Covid-19 is shining a light on leadership: here’s how it needs to evolve
Mary-Clare Race

Reimagining businesses for the post-Covid era
Martin Reeves and Kevin Whitaker

A new equation
Jim Hagemann Snabe and Lars Thinggaard

Responding to the crisis by building perpetual capabilities
Ricardo Viana Vargas, Edivandro Carlos Conforto, Tahirou Assane Oumarou, and Emil Andersson

Little fires everywhere: how leaders can ensure their transformation programmes are creating value
Tendayi Viki

The SECURE framework for crisis leadership: how to Survive, Stabilize, and then Surge
Ian C. Woodward, V. “Paddy” Padmanabhan, and Sameer Hasija

When faced with uncertainty, leaders cannot come up with the best solutions by themselves. They need to work with their teams. The Covid 19 pandemic is forcing leaders to face the limitations of a command and control style of management. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies and different ways of working. It has also brought sharply into focus the need for companies to have world-class innovation capabilities.

Leaders that fail to create the right context for breakthrough ideas to emerge from their teams will find themselves and their companies lagging behind.

Join us as Dr. Tendayi Viki, Associate Partner at Strategyzer, examines how leaders can drive innovation by asking the right questions at the right time.  He will discuss:

• the type of leadership support that is needed for innovation flourish
• how leaders can inspire breakthrough innovations by asking trigger questions
• how leaders can use creative inquiry to find the ideas that are likely to succeed

Tendayi Viki is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer where he helps large organizations innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has written three books based on his research and consulting experience, Pirates in The Navy, The Corporate Startup and The Lean Product Lifecycle.

About Back2Better

We are excited to partner up with Executive Networks to bring an exclusive collection of new resources for navigating change through the Back2Better webinar series, which includes 50 Webinars in 50 Weeks. The series officially kicks off in September and focuses on real-time actionable insights from the world’s top business leaders, academics, and HR thought leaders that help organizations adapt and evolve to the new future of work.

A catalyst for deeper exploration of the world of work, Back2Better is a platform for community knowledge-sharing that will help prepare forward-thinking organizations and their leaders to evolve and grow in the months to come. Through informative webinars delivered over the course of 50 weeks, this program covers timely topics selected moment to moment through a process informed by Executive Network member surveys, research from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, and insights from an esteemed advisory board. This is your opportunity to explore how you can adapt to the future of HR post-COVID with leading business professionals from Harvard, NYU, Amazon, and other top institutions and organizations.

Unlike startups, large companies have to follow the rules. As Steve Blank notes:

Startups can do anything.

Companies can only do what’s legal.

Having no business model and no market reputation to defend makes startups quite dangerous as competitors. If you combine this with the fact that startups are now better funded and their incentives are aligned with their investors, large companies are competing with a formidable foe.

Meanwhile, inside most large companies there are still leaders who question the need to innovate. To be fair, there is a discernible shift in leadership attitudes towards innovation taking place. However, in most large companies there is still an intractable core of leaders who actively resist innovation projects as a waste of time and resources.

It is a myth that innovation is sexy. In a lot of companies, it is career suicide! So while startups are focused on enemies and competitors that are outside their company, innovators within large companies have to contend with enemies and competitors inside their own companies as well.

Innovator’s Dilemma

Corporate innovation is a paradox. Intrapreneurs have to innovate for the future, inside a machine designed to run the current business. It is the management of the current business that tends to get in the way of innovation. The bureaucracy and incentives of the organization are all geared towards improving and exploiting the currently successful products and business models.

At the same time, these large corporations have entrepreneurial employees who are constantly trying to innovate. As far I am concerned, these are crazy people! They wake up every morning and go to work to swim against the tide. This is insane! And yet, these people exist. Passionate people who are committed to helping their company become more innovative. They can see the future coming and they are committed to ensuring that their company survives in that future.

Some leaders are not happy with these crazy innovators. They view these innovators as disruptive rebels or pirates. These leaders actively create barriers to block innovation efforts, often driving intrapreneurs to quit their jobs in frustration. When innovation does succeed inside a large company, it is often as one-off projects that have had to be nursed through the landmines of corporate politics. This can be demoralizing.

Most intrapreneurs recognize that they cannot keep doing innovation as a series of one-off projects that have to jump through political hurdles. They realise that there is a need for some change inside their companies to allow innovation to happen as a repeatable process. But how do they get this done? How do pirates slowly transform the navy to become more supportive of innovation?

Pirates In The Navy

I am totally convinced that it is possible for innovators to succeed in corporate environments. In my new book, Pirates In The Navy, my goal is to destroy the notion that innovators should view the company they work for in an antagonistic way. Instead, what we want to do is make innovation a core part of how our company does business. Our piracy has to become a part of the institutional structures and processes inside the company. To do this, innovators have to embrace the idea that they may be pirates, but not all pirates are the same.

Terms like pirate, privateer and buccaneer are often used interchangeably. While all three words describe pirates, they do not mean the same thing. The difference between pirates and privateers is most important for innovators in large companies.

• A pirate is a person who commits theft at sea. This involves attacking ships, often without discrimination. In other words, a pirate is essentially a criminal.
• A privateer was a pirate who had been granted a licence by a government to attack and steal from ships belonging to an enemy government.

The privateer’s licence, also known as the Letter of Marque, meant that when they returned with the proceeds of their adventures, these would be shared between the government, the ship owners and the privateer. In other words, a privateer had backing from their government to do the work.

It was even better when privateers secured commissions to become explorers. Privateers like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Thomas Cavendish would get commissions from their governments to explore foreign territories and claim some of them for their home countries. This meant that when they returned with their findings, there was interest from their governments to further invest in the enterprise.

This is where the difference lies for Pirates In The Navy. If you are just a pirate, then the leaders inside your company do not really care about what you are working on. If your idea is found, it will be made to walk the plank. But if you are a privateer or an explorer, the leaders in your company care about your success. This is because they have essentially commissioned the work you are doing. As such, the innovation projects you work on are much more likely to get the support they need to succeed.

Conclusion

How to get the commission to be a privateer or explorer is what my new book is about. This is not easy work. There is a lot of inertia inside large companies and any efforts at transformation will trigger resistance. But if we succeed in getting our Letter of Marque, we will have made innovation a legitimate part of our company. This is the transformation we are working towards. We want to work in a company that is good at both managing its core business and exploring new opportunities.

_________

This article is an excerpt from Pirates In The Navy, a new book by Tendayi Viki, with illustrations from Holger Nils Pohl. You can order your copy of the book here.

Nobody would argue that great leaders are lifelong learners. And to help great leaders learn management science has historically borrowed from more established disciplines to supplement its relatively short history.  Emotional intelligence and the importance of self-awareness have risen from a tradition of behavioral and neurosciences.  Innovation has roots in scientific disciplines like aerospace and chemistry.  Modern problem solving approaches in organizations have emerged from several fields of mathematics.  And while these contributions have been meaningful in the quest for knowledge, in my experience, today’s managers have become much like leadership tourists – only interested in the highlights of the latest and greatest fads. The irony is that having access to volumes more information may be impairing, not enhancing, a leader’s capacity to actually think and learn.

I spoke with Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50, about their new initiative to connect leaders to the ancient, but relatively untapped discipline yet to merge with management science: philosophy.  Says Crainer, “The business world has become enormously complex.  Philosophy will enable business leaders to better understand that complexity, live with it, and make better decisions within it. The corporate world of the 70s held much more straightforward black and white, right and wrong views.  Today, we are in a constant perennially gray area, blurring lines between science and ethics, social and economic good.  Leaders simply must have a willingness, and the capacity, to wrestle with much bigger concerns of humanity beyond corporate performance.”

To launch this campaign, Thinkers50 will be publishing a series of books on a new imprint, Unbound.  The first book in the series is titled, Pirates in the Navy, by Tendayi Viki.  It explores the fundamentals of innovation within the complexities of large, established organizations that must focus on today while innovating for tomorrow.

So, could today’s executives really gain deep and relevant insights from the likes of Voltaire, Kierkegaard, and Beauvoir?  Turns out, absolutely. There’s plenty of new insights the vast field of philosophy can uniquely provide for leaders genuinely interested in extending their impact. Here are three of them.

Broaden and deepen your capacity to think.  Says Crainer, “Peter Drucker was one of the widest read thinkers known.  He re-read Jane Austin as a practice every year.  We’ve had too much narrowing of management thinking over the years. Our need for expediency has short-circuited deep thinking.”  Leaders face greater levels of false-immediacy than ever. We confuse rash impulsivity for genuine urgency.  And in a day when social media and other technology makes most leadership play out on a public stage, the importance of broader thinking can be over-stated.  Leaders must learn to step back and weigh options, consider opposing views, and resist the temptations of false-binaries in order to generate a wide menu of solutions to complex problems.  Anders Inset says, “René Descartes, dubbed by many as the father of western philosophy, teaches us valuable lessons on the art of thinking and how to get a complete overview. Data doesn’t hold all the answers, and information and data might give us knowledge, but not necessarily understanding.”

Embrace the bigger questions. With augmented reality and artificial intelligence encroaching on organizations at numbing speeds, protecting the special and unique contributions that only humanity can make to the world should be every leader’s priority. Never before have questions of meaning and purpose been so central in the workplace.  A few weeks ago, a client of mine, the CEO of a major luxury goods brand, said to me while preparing for a board meeting at which he would present strategic choices of significant consequence, “I just need you to know that I’m scared going into this. Not so much of what will happen to me, but what will happen because of me.  There are days I understand the importance of the work and products we produce, and there are other days I wonder if we aren’t doing a disservice to the wealthy among us. I need to believe that the direction I’m suggesting we move in is the right one for this decades old brand.  In my head, I believe it. But in my soul, I’m still getting there.”  I was deeply moved by his vulnerability, and taken back by the greater existential questions he was wrestling with.  He was contemplating colossal changes to his industry, not just his brand.  And he was acknowledging that he felt unprepared for doing so, much less the consequences for doing so.

I expect larger questions of human significance will become standard fare as organizations must adapt more quickly to externally imposed shifts.  Philosophy wrestles with nested questions of meaning, impact, and consequence as a fundamental principle of the discipline.  Leaders need to form their own philosophies of how they will govern and navigate when turbulence hits.  Says Crainer, “Lots of leaders like to put famous quotes from philosophers on the covers of their presentations to appear well-read and informed. But few are willing to actually entertain the questions implied by those quotes.  All philosophy creates questions intended to provoke and elevate the important debates we have to higher levels.”

Build bridges that connect unlikely partners.  Says Crainer, “Management is a magpie science.  It’s borrowed from many other places in order to make people think differently.”  Philosophy, too, blends many historically disparate disciplines.  Religion, theology, ethics, morality, sociology, astronomy, economics and politics all blend far more naturally than they would on their own under the broader umbrella of philosophy.  As an integrated field, it creates a place of belonging for all those beliefs.  Rather than pitting them against one another, it creates a space for each to contribute something.

Organizational life is much the same.  While we try with cheesy mission and values statements to harmonize organizations into communities, the reality is that as they grow larger, organizations become fragmented and rivalrous. A leader’s job is to build bridges across organizational borders to connect unlikely perspectives and aspirations, unifying them into a cohesive whole.  Philosophy does this naturally. It has a disarming power that allows the merits of seemingly contradictory views to blend onto common ground without losing their distinction.  It changes the debate from “Whose view must prevail?” to “How does this perspective contribute to our greater good?” Leaders with the breadth to do this for their organizations create greater clarity of purpose, building alliances between organizational parts that traditionally clashed.  Says Crainer, “Can you just imagine the CEO of a big company walking into a board meeting carrying a copy of Jean Paul Sartre?”

Management science is in definite need of a more expansive horizon.  The ancient traditions and writings of philosophers just may offer todays, and tomorrow’s leaders a new source of breakthrough insights.  And how wonderful these aren’t some newfangled reconstitution of a hackneyed fad. These are time tested sources of ancient wisdom refined over centuries.  Perfect to pioneer with….again.

Image courtesy Yolanda Frost

Thinkers50 and Unbound plan a new business book imprint which will bring together the world’s leading business thinkers and the latest crowdfunding technology to launch the next generation of business book publishing.

“We have been involved with business books for more than 25 years and the industry is desperately in need of a new business model,” says Thinkers50 co-founder Des Dearlove. “We believe that Unbound’s innovative crowdfunding business model combined with our community of thinkers will enable us to accelerate the availability of groundbreaking business ideas to 21st century speed.”

The initial projects to be crowdfunded in the Thinkers50/Unbound partnership include The Paradoxes of Leadership by the iconoclastic Finnish thinker Alf Rehn; Pirates in the Navy by the innovation guru, Tendayi Viki; and Philosophy@Work by the business philosopher Anders Indset.

“We look forward to developing our list of published books rapidly, drawing on some of the great minds in the Thinkers50 community as well as from original business thinkers yet to be discovered,” says Thinkers50’s Stuart Crainer.

Dan Kieran, Unbound CEO and co-founder, says: “We’re really excited to be working with Thinkers50. Unbound is the perfect platform to help bring the ideas and stories of some of the world’s biggest innovators and business leaders into the world, so this is a fantastic collaboration for us.”

About Thinkers50
Thinkers50 (thinkers50.com) identifies, ranks and shares the very best in management ideas. Its definitive global ranking of management thinkers is published every two years. The top ranked thinker in 2017 was Roger Martin. Previous recipients of the coveted #1 spot include Michael Porter (2015 and 2005); Clayton Christensen (2013 and 2011); CK Prahalad (2009 and 2007); and Peter Drucker (2003 and 2001). @thinkers50

About Unbound
Unbound (unbound.com) was founded in 2011 by writers Dan Kieran, John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard. Since then it has published over 200 books, including the Sunday Times bestselling Letters of Note, the Man Booker Prize long-listed The Wake, and the winner of the 2016 Books Are My Bag Reader’s Choice Award, The Good Immigrant. Fusing traditional ideas of patronage with contemporary crowd-funding models, Unbound seeks to publish the books which readers want to read, providing a new platform for the most challenging and innovative of projects. @unbounders

Contacts

Unbound
www.unbound.com
Amy Winchester, Head of Publicity
amy@unbound.com

Thinkers50
www.thinkers50.com
Stuart Crainer
stuart.crainer@thinkers50.com

Des Dearlove
des.dearlove@thinkers50.com

Most of what is considered “innovation culture” is “innovation theater.” Having rooms with business model canvases, sharpies and sticky notes is not innovation culture. Neither is opening an innovation lab or working with startup accelerators. Even after putting all these practices in place, executives are still frustrated by the lack of results. They have all the great innovation tools in their business, but no innovation.

What most leaders need to realize is that innovation culture is not some mythical phenomenon floating around their companies. Their company’s culture is created daily by what, they themselves as leaders, punish, recognize, celebrate and reward. The adoption of new innovation tools will not help a company if its leadership team is still hanging onto traditional management practices. So while executives lament the lack of innovation in their companies they are still unwilling to relinquish thirty-paged business plans and the calculation of bonuses based on annual sales targets.

Originally published on Forbes
Photo: Samsung’s C-Lab in South Korea. Photographer: Jean Chung/Bloomberg