Outthinkers

Andrea Petrone is an executive and performance coach who advises CEOs and senior leaders, drawing on more than 20 years working with Fortune 500, mid-cap and high-growth companies. He is a Fortune contributor and host of The World-Class Leaders Show, and he is the author of Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley). Originally from Italy, he has spent the last 13...

Naveen Jain is a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder of multiple billion-dollar companies, including Infospace, Moon Express, and the health company Viome, where he is founder and CEO. His new book, Counterintuitive: Unconventional Principles for Success in Life and Business, lays out the way of thinking behind all of it. His argument is that breakthrough results don’t come from being...

Hamilton Mann is an AI researcher, technology executive, and award-winning author. He is Executive Chairman and President of the Artificial Integrity Institute, lectures at INSEAD and HEC Paris, and mentors at MIT's Priscilla King Gray Center. In 2025 he received the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Digital Thinking. He is the author of the acclaimed Artificial Integrity: The Pa...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Ron Johnson - the retail visionary behind the Apple Store and Target's design revolution about what it really takes to permanently change the trajectory of a business, not just improve it.  During the conversation they unpack why being different isn't enough and why the only winning strategy is one tha...

Caroline Webb is an executive coach, economist, and former McKinsey partner. She is the author of the global bestseller How to Have a Good Day, published in more than 60 countries, and has been named one of the world's top 50 executive coaches by Thinkers50. Her new book, Leadership Intelligence, distills three decades of advising CEOs and senior leaders into a science-backed playbook for mas...

Julie Averill is a technology and transformation executive with nearly three decades of experience scaling global businesses. As Global CIO and EVP at Lululemon, she led an eight-year transformation that helped grow the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue and built its award-winning India Technology Hub. She previously served as CIO at REI and held senior technology leadership r...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Vijay Govindarajan — VG — about why the next breakthrough American innovation may be discovered in a village in India before it ever reaches Silicon Valley. Fifteen years after introducing the world to reverse innovation, VG returns with a new book co-written with MIT mechanical engineer Amos Winter, Global by D...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Philipp Muelbert about the three loops every company falls into when their talent needs shift — and why the cheapest-looking option on paper is usually the most expensive one in practice. During the conversation they unpack why AI has become a convenient excuse for restructuring decisions that were coming anyway...

David Fubini spent 34 years at McKinsey & Company, where he was a Senior Partner, Managing Director of the Boston office, and co-founder of the firm's Worldwide Merger Integration Practice — leading dozens of the world's largest M&A transactions. He's now a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he co-leads the Mergers & Acquisitions and Leading Professional S...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Carrol Chang about why the unit of work is shifting from the full-time employee to the task itself — and what that means for every leader rethinking their workforce in the age of AI. During the conversation they unpack what happens when AI handles all the junior work today, and who develops the senior judgment y...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Eric Ries — author of the landmark The Lean Startup — about his new book Incorruptible , and why the way we've run companies for the last fifty years may be fundamentally corrupt. Not in the dramatic, headline-grabbing sense, but in the older, quieter sense of the word: a slow corrosion of the bonds that ma...

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Scott Snyder about why most companies are failing to get real value from AI — and why the problem has nothing to do with the technology. During the conversation they unpack why incumbents keep repeating the same mistakes across every major technology wave, and what it actually takes to move an organisation from...

Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a globally recognised reinvention strategist, four-time author, and founder of the Reinvention Academy. A former chaired professor at a business school in the Slovenian Alps, she coined the role of Chief Reinvention Officer — unifying strategy, innovation, and change management into a single connected discipline. She has worked with organisations across mining, telecom, f...

Peter Weinberg is the founder of Evidenza, an AI-powered synthetic research platform, and a former LinkedIn executive where he co-founded the B2B Institute. Over a decade at LinkedIn, Peter helped reframe how B2B brands think about growth — shifting the industry's focus from bottom-of-funnel conversion toward brand building, mental availability, and reaching buyers before they enter the marke...

New on Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Lew Frankfort about how Coach scaled while building trust, durability, and emotional connection with customers.   During the conversation they unpack what scaling really requires when growth threatens to dilute what made you successful in the first place.   Lew Frankfort reflects on spotting Coach’s early cult follo...

Joe Pine is the co-author of The Experience Economy—and one of the thinkers who gave leaders a language for why “services” weren’t the end of the story. In this episode, Joe returns with his next major thesis: we’ve entered the Transformation Economy, where the customer is no longer buying inputs (features, service hours, or even memorable moments), but paying for outcomes—lasting change. We unpac...

In a recent Outthinkers episode sponsored by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff is joined by Linda Hill (Havard Business School) and Jason Wild (WISE) to discuss what it takes to move innovation beyond isolated efforts and into something that can work across an entire organization   They explore how strategy is shifting, from control to adaptability, what's actually driving advantage in 2026, and...

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

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

Dr. Brent Ridge is the co-founder of Beekman 1802, a skin health brand that began with goat milk soap made at a dining room table and scaled into a nationally recognized business with a devoted community. Brent trained in medicine (geriatrics), built his career in New York City, and even helped launch Martha Stewart’s Healthy Living division—before a recession, a rundown farm, and a herd of goats...

Jana Werner is a global executive advisor and Executive in Residence at Amazon Web Services, where she works with Fortune 500 leadership teams on organizational transformation and enterprise strategy. She holds a PhD in uncertainty dynamics in projects and has contributed to academic research and teaching at institutions including Oxford and the London School of Economics. Phil Le-Brun spent 31 ye...

Mark Thompson is a CEO coach and author of CEO Ready. Born and raised in Silicon Valley and now working across emerging tech hubs, Mark prepares leaders for the leap from elite operator to enterprise chief. He’s worked with CEOs ranging from Richard Branson and Evan Sharp (co-founder of Pinterest) to Dr. Jim Yong Kim (former president of the World Bank) and Dave Chang (founder of Momofuku). Most e...

Bill George is one of the most influential leadership thinkers of our time. A former CEO of Medtronic and long-time Harvard Business School professor, he’s served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, Novartis, and the Mayo Clinic. His books including True North and True North: Emerging Leader Edition—have shaped how thousands of leaders approach purpose, values, and character. When performa...

Meet Jon Levy — behavioral scientist and author of Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius and the NYT/WSJ bestseller You’re Invited. Jon has spent years studying human behavior and leadership mechanics, advising companies on how to build teams that actually perform—beyond leadership myths and buzzwords. We often hire “A-players,” roll out values, and assume great leaders...

Christina Farr is an investor, startup advisor, and former health-tech journalist. She’s the author of The Storyteller’s Advantage: How Powerful Narratives Make Businesses Thrive and the creator of the Second Opinion newsletter, where she decodes healthcare and technology for leaders. Most leaders try to move markets with features, roadmaps, and metrics. But the winners often move them with narrat...