Outthinkers

Ben Gomes-Casseres has worked on partnership strategies for thirty years, as a researcher, teacher, and advisor. A professor at Brandeis University, Ben directs the Asper Center for Global Entrepreneurship. Previously, he was at Harvard Business School and at the World Bank. Ben has published five books and many articles and case studies on M&A, alliances, and joint ventures, and his views hav...

Fred Reichheld is the creator of the Net Promotor Score (or NPS). He is a Bain Fellow and the founder of their Loyalty practice, which helps companies achieve results through customer and employee loyalty. His work in the area of customer and employee retention has quantified the link between loyalty and profits. He's authored numerous best-selling books including The Loyalty Effect, Loyalty...

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, served as Senior Advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from, was a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore, and was Co-Direct...

Dan Toma is an innovation thought leader and the co-author of two of my favorite books on innovation. The award-winning book The Corporate Startup, (awarded "Management Book of the Year for Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Chartered Management Institute and The British Library in 2018) and his latest, Innovation Accounting. Dan started his career in entrepreneurship, being involved wi...

Tiffani Bova is the chief growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business. Tiffani has been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers and is a welcomed guest on Bloomberg, BNN, Cheddar, MSNBC, and Yahoo Finance, among others. She also contribu...

Michael Tushman is a Baker Foundation Professor, Paul R Lawrence Professor Emeritus, and faculty chair of the Advanced Management Program (AMP) at Harvard Business School. He is also a founding director of Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. Michael is internationally recognized for his work on the relations between technological change, executive leadership and organization adap...

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 Sen...

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 t...

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 affec...

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 pharmaceutical...

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...

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...

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 Ji...

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 t...

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 com...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 Stree...

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 inno...

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 othe...

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...

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...

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, Co...

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...