Only 2% of people are narcissists — but roughly 16% of CEOs are. Jennifer Chatman explains why narcissistic leadership gets mistaken for vision, how to spot it, and how to protect your culture from its sticky after-effects.
Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile, Part 2: NeXT's Failures, Pixar's Lifeline and the Road Back to Apple
Posted 2 weeks ago Tagged Aidan McCullen business podcast Disruption Geoffrey Cain innovation podcast leadership podcast NeXT Computer NeXTSTEP Pixar reality distortion field startup failure lessons Steve Jobs Steve Jobs in Exile Steve Jobs in Exile book Steve Jobs NeXT years The Innovation Show Thinkers50 Toy Story WebObjects
Author Geoffrey Cain takes Aidan McCullen inside Steve Jobs in Exile — the NeXT years of vengeance, sabotage and failure that quietly built the Apple comeback.
Posted 3 weeks ago Tagged Aidan McCullen Apple history business biography business podcast Entrepreneurship Geoffrey Cain innovation podcast John Sculley leadership podcast NeXT Computer Pixar Steve Jobs Ross Perot NeXT Steve Jobs Steve Jobs biography Steve Jobs fired from Apple Steve Jobs in Exile survivorship bias The Innovation Show Thinkers50
Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs in Exile: fired from Apple in 1985, sued by his own company, three years from bankruptcy at NeXT — and how those failures forged the leader who saved Apple. Part 1 of 2.
Posted 4 weeks ago Tagged agentic AI enterprise AI native business model AI rewiring organizations Aidan McCullen Alexander Osterwalder business model canvas business podcast death of the billable hour Disruption Frame Break Future Of Work innovation podcast Ismail Amla leadership podcast permissionless organization Rita McGrath The Innovation Show Transient Advantage Usman Sheikh
A single developer sold an $80 million company to Wix in six months. In this Kyndryl Institute panel, Rita McGrath, Alexander Osterwalder, Ismail Amla and Usman Sheikh explain how AI is rewiring organisations — killing the billable hour, flattening power, and shifting work from hours to outcomes.
Posted 1 month ago Tagged best practices builder's intuition Clay Christensen corporate corruption corporate governance Costco enlightened capitalism Eric Ries ethos Fedmart fiduciary duty financial gravity founder mode golden goose governance fortress hyper-financialisation Incorruptible Incorruptible Blueprint Innovation Jim Sinegal Leadership Long-Term Stock Exchange LTSE mission drift New Lanark organisational character organisational strength Robert Owen shareholder primacy short-termism Sol Price superorganism The Lean Startup value creation value extraction Wall Street
Eric Ries — author of Incorruptible and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange — joins Aidan McCullen to expose the hidden forces that corrupt mission-driven organisations. From financial gravity and the golden goose problem to the LTSE ambush and the Costco governance fortress, this is a blueprint for building an incorruptible organisation that lasts.
Posted 1 month ago Tagged Abbie Griffin AI hiring bias Aidan McCullen air cover management apprenticeship model breakthrough innovation Bruce Vojak bureaucracy innovation burnout innovation career development innovation Clayton Christensen command and control leadership Corporate Innovation customer empathy Demco SAIC developing serial innovators fuzzy front end golden handcuffs hard assignments HR screening innovation identifying serial innovators incentive design Innovation Culture Innovation Leadership Innovation Management Innovation Mindset innovation podcast Innovation Strategy innovator development innovator traits J work Kyndryl managing serial innovators mature firms innovation New Product Development phase gate process pheasant metaphor pi shaped workers pie shaped workers Raymond Price relational management Serial Innovators book serial innovators research spinout innovation systems thinking The Innovation Show war room research
Bruce Vojak closes our three-part Serial Innovators series with the playbook for finding and protecting breakthrough talent: the five core traits to look for, the four engagement filters that actually identify a serial innovator, why HR and AI hiring screens filter them out, and the manager behaviours — air cover, patience, no “J work” — that keep them from walking out the door.
Posted 2 months ago Tagged Abbie Griffin innovation Aidan McCullen breakthrough innovation politics Bruce Vojak Change Management Corporate Innovation crossing the bridge innovation Disruption how to get ideas approved innovation in large companies innovation podcast Innovation Strategy intrapreneur leadership podcast organisational politics serial innovators Serial Innovators book The Innovation Show Thinkers50
Most innovators believe a great idea will sell itself. Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators, joins Aidan McCullen to reveal why that belief will get you fired — and how the rare few who repeatedly deliver breakthrough innovations inside mature firms actually navigate the organisational politics that stop everyone else cold.
Posted 2 months ago Tagged Abbie Griffin Aidan McCullen breakthrough innovation Bruce Vojak Corporate Innovation create market acceptance customer empathy Design Thinking find the right problem fuzzy front end hourglass innovation model Innovation Culture Innovation Leadership Innovation Mindset innovation podcast innovation process innovation self-diagnostic Innovation Strategy invent and validate it's them not me Kyndryl mature firms innovation New Product Development NPD process organisational innovation Raymond Price serial innovators Serial Innovators book stage gate process The Hourglass Model Vojak The Innovation Show
Bruce Vojak returns for a short bonus episode on the Hourglass Model — the descriptive state diagram he and his co-authors built to explain how serial innovators actually move from a customer problem to a launched product, without the prescriptive rigidity of stage-gate.
Posted 2 months ago Tagged breakthrough innovation Bruce Vojak customering Iain Mcgilchrist mature firms MP5 model Procter & Gamble Product Development S-Curve serial innovators stage gate Thinkers50 Tom Osborne
Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators, explains why roughly 1 in 500 employees inside a large mature firm — with no formal mandate, often almost fired — create most of the breakthrough products that fund everything else.
Posted 2 months ago Tagged Adaptive Leadership ambiguity Bureaucracy change leadership Change Management change theater changemakers conflict deviance Failure growth mindset influence Innovation Jeff DeGraff Leadership Learning Mindset Organisational Change organisational culture paradox paradoxes of change paradoxical mindset Personal Development Resilience self-change Staney DeGraff strategic thinking The Art of Change Transformation
Organisations love innovation, but they hate their innovators.” Jeff and Staney DeGraff close out the DeGraff trilogy with The Art of Change — the paradox mindset, the seven paradoxes, and why the man who saved Operation Warp Speed got passed over for promotion.