Arkaro Insights: adapt and thrive in complexity

Many businesses are brilliant at execution, and brilliant at executing the wrong things. Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid Group and author of Value Centric, explains why efficiency alone is a downward spiral, and how AI is about to close the gap between planning and value. Profit is not the goal. Profit is a result. That single reframe sits at the heart of this conversation with Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid...

Most corporate values are useless. Not because values don't matter, but because organisations have spent thirty years reaching for the same twenty-four words, integrity, collaboration, respect, excellence, and wondering why nobody believes them. Erika Clegg is the co-founder of Larkenby, creator of the Active Ethos method and author of Junk Values . She joins Mark Blackwell to explain why gen...

Most people assume food miles are the enemy of sustainable sourcing. They are wrong. Transportation and freight account for less than 10% of a food product's total environmental impact. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is at the farm. Defne Saral, Senior Vice President of Sales at ofi, one of the world's largest processors of cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices, and dairy ingredie...

What if the companies that think AI is someone else's problem are about to lose their most valuable competitive ground? Professor Venkat Venkatraman from Boston University's Questrom School of Business is the co-author of Fusion Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press) and one of the world's leading authorities on how legacy industrial firms use real-time data networks and AI to rei...

What if the teams that struggle to define their problem early are actually your best innovation bet? Dr Johnathan Cromwell, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of San Francisco, shares findings from a study of over 1,100 real innovation teams at a Fortune Global 500 company. The results overturn one of the most deeply held assumptions in innovation management:...

Success is supposed to be the goal. So why does it so often destroy the very thing that made an organisation great? Eric Ries — author of The Lean Startup — returns with a new book and a sobering answer. What if the greatest threat to a successful organisation is not competition, disruption, or poor strategy — but success itself? Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term S...

Two thirds of business leaders face imminent disruption, yet most are reaching for AI as a forklift to move their intellectual weight for them. Scott Anthony returns to Arkaro Insights to argue this is exactly the wrong instinct. In this follow-up to our conversation on Epic Disruptions, Scott — Clinical Professor at the Tuck School of Business and former senior partner at Innosight — explores wha...

Most leadership failure is not a strategy problem. It is a presence problem. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell speaks with Linden Thorp, a Buddhist priest, somatic practitioner, communication specialist, and creator of the Lodestone Method. After more than four decades in academia, contemplative practice, and now executive boardrooms, Linden has watched leader after leader run on...

"There are no executives alive on the planet today that have ever overseen the implementation of a general purpose technology to their organisations." — Joseph Fuller, Harvard Business School Most companies are making the same mistake with AI that factory owners made when electricity arrived in the 1880s — bolting the new technology onto old processes and calling it transformation. Aroun...

What separates a high-performing team from a group of talented individuals who consistently underperform? According to Dr Keith Sawyer, the answer lies in group flow — a state of peak collective experience that goes far beyond individual performance. Dr Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the world’s...

What if innovation were not a mysterious creative gift but a measurable engineering discipline? That is exactly the argument Professor David Cropley of the University of Adelaide makes — and he has the diagnostic framework to back it up. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell talks with David about why most organisations are failing at innovation, where precisely the failure occurs, an...

What if sustainability weren't a cost of doing business, but its central engine? That is exactly the transformation Juan Aguiriano, Group Head of Sustainability at Kerry, has helped to architect over the past seven years. In this episode, Juan traces Kerry's journey from its roots as an Irish dairy cooperative to its emergence as what the company calls an impact company, with an audaciou...

What does the science of creativity actually tell us about working with AI? And where does human judgement remain irreplaceable? Mark Blackwell speaks with Dr Todd Lubart, Professor of Psychology at Université Paris Cité, about his research on Cyber-Creativity and the future of human-AI collaboration in innovation. Todd has spent his career building rigorous frameworks for understanding and measur...

That famous statistic, that 70% of organisational transformations fail, turns out to have no evidence behind it whatsoever. So says Professor Julie Hodges, and she should know. As Professor of Organisational Change at Durham University Business School, and with 20 years of commercial experience at PwC and Royal Bank of Scotland, Julie is one of the world's leading authorities on how organisat...

Most organisations are asking the wrong question about AI. They're treating it as a technology to be managed rather than a capability that should serve their business goals. The result? An executive vacuum where leadership sees the potential but the middle of the organisation is paralysed on the how. In this episode, Mark speaks with Charlene Li — one of the world's foremost experts on d...

45% of teams select a suboptimal solution — even when a better one is right in front of them. Creativity researcher Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon explains why, and what leaders can do to fix it. Most teams jump straight to solutions. It feels productive. It looks like progress. But according to Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon, that instinct is costing organisations their best ideas — before they ever get off the...

Why do sophisticated five-year plans so often fail the moment they hit real-world complexity? In this conversation, Pete Compo—author of The Emergent Approach to Strategy and former corporate director at DuPont—argues that traditional planning isn't just ineffective in today's world, it's actively dangerous. Most leadership teams operate with LAMO tools (linear, anthropocentric, mec...

Former Akzo Nobel supply chain chief Karen-Marie Katholm on leading 14,000 people through transformation—why soft skills beat technical expertise when navigating complexity. How do you transform 13 separate supply chains into one integrated operation across 130 manufacturing sites and 14,000 employees? Karen-Marie Katholm has done exactly that. As former Chief Integrated Supply Chain Officer at Ak...

We're told to think outside the box. But what if the box is your greatest creative asset? Dr. Catrinel Tromp explains the cognitive science behind why constraints drive innovation — and why the most dangerous barriers are the ones you've stopped questioning. Think outside the box. Blue sky thinking. Start with a blank canvas. It's advice we hear constantly — but what if it's wr...

Jim Lafferty spent 30 years leading in some of the world's most volatile markets. His secret weapon? A test so simple your mother could apply it. What if the smartest person to pressure-test your strategy isn't a consultant or an MBA — but your mum? Jim Lafferty didn't follow the traditional path to Fortune 500 leadership. He started as a fitness instructor, built his career across...

You cannot just be a leader that takes a can of digital paint and paints over the analogue cracks of your business. It will not survive the disruption that's coming. In this episode, Marco Ryan, former Chief Digital Officer at BP and co-author of Rewire or Retire: AI for Leaders , challenges us to rethink how we lead in an AI-driven world. Marco argues that AI isn't fundamentally a techn...

Welcome to the Arkaro Insights podcast. This episode is based on original content developed by Arkaro. At Arkaro, we're committed to innovation in everything we do—including how we share our insights. We've utilised advanced AI technology to transform our written expertise into this conversational format, making our content more accessible and convenient for our busy B2B audience. What y...

Niels van Hove joins Mark Blackwell to explore how AI is transforming S&OP and IBP from bureaucratic box-ticking to decision-centric planning. Discover why planners waste 50% of their time on low-value tasks, how automation and augmentation differ, and Niels's bold vision for AI-powered "decision avatars" that could revolutionise executive decision-making. ____ Is your S&OP...

How can your organisation use AI without it going wrong? With 95% of organisations failing to see a return on their AI investments, this question has never been more pressing for business leaders. In this episode of Arkaro Insights, I'm joined by Ray Eitel-Porter, co-author of "Governing the Machine: How to Navigate the Risks of AI and Unlock Its True Potential". Ray has spent over...

Do you believe creativity requires complete freedom? You're not alone — 70% of people think the same. But Yale research reveals the opposite: constraints actually enhance creative output. Dr Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Senior Research Scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of The Creativity Choice , joins Mark Blackwell to explore why creativity is a learnable process...