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.
What if the best practices taught in every business school are quietly destroying the organisations that follow them? Eric Ries — author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange — joins Aidan McCullen to expose the hidden forces that corrupt mission-driven organisations, and to reveal the structural defences that keep outliers like Costco immune.
About Eric Ries Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and the bestselling author of The Lean Startup. His new book, Incorruptible, maps the structural forces that destroy company missions and lays out a blueprint for building organisations that resist them. He is also the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE).
About Aidan McCullen Aidan McCullen is a Thinkers50-recognised host, keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable, and former professional athlete. He is the founder and host of The Innovation Show — the podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
In this conversation, Eric reveals:
- Why mission drift and bureaucracy are really corruption — and why naming them that changes everything
- How financial gravity silently pulls every organisation toward value extraction unless actively resisted
- The professor story that launched the book — and the question that haunts every founder: is it even possible to build an incorruptible organisation?
- The LTSE ambush: how Eric’s team chose potential bankruptcy over compromising their principles — and why that decision ultimately saved the company
- Why the founder hero story and the market story are the same story told backwards — and how that confusion destroys organisations from the inside
- The golden goose paradox: why Sol Price and Robert Owen kept losing control of the very organisations they built
- The Costco governance fortress — how Jim Sinegal created a structure that protects the fiduciary-to-the-customer ethos no matter how hard Wall Street pushes back
00:00 Sponsor Message
00:26 Naming Corruption
02:32 Why Best Practices Fail
05:08 Professor Story Wake Up Call
09:57 Financial Gravity And Strength
12:26 LTSE Ambush And Principles
19:14 Founder Hero Vs Market Story
23:56 Golden Goose And Case Studies
25:19 Sol Price And Robert Owen
30:46 Costco Governance Fortress
33:15 Wrap Up And Resources
34:26 Sponsor Outro
Guest links:
- Book: https://amzn.to/4e89kOx
- More resources: https://www.incorruptible.co/resources/more-failures
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Incorruptible, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Subscribe and follow: https://theinnovationshow.io
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen
“I don’t like J work.”
That was Andy — a top serial innovator at SAIC — telling his manager Dennis what he needed to be protected from. J work, in Andy’s field of computational electromagnetics, is the imaginary part of a number. To Andy, it meant the imaginary work: staff meetings, budget reviews, formal reporting. Dennis’s job was to keep him in real work. Most managers do the opposite.
In part three of our Serial Innovators series, Bruce Vojak closes the loop. After two episodes on who serial innovators are and how they navigate the politics, this one is about how organisations find them, develop them — and how managers can stop accidentally driving them out the door.
Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms (with Ray Price and Abby Griffin), founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering.
In this conversation, Bruce reveals:
• Why mechanistic, CV-screening HR processes — and now AI-powered hiring filters — systematically screen out your future innovators
• The four engagement filters that actually identify a serial innovator: how they engage with problems, projects, business, and people
• The five core traits — systems thinking, above-average (but not extreme) creativity, innate curiosity, deep-expertise intuition, and the intrinsic drive to make things better
• Why π-shaped (pi-shaped) workers — broad across domains AND deep in multiple specialisms — beat T-shaped specialists
• Why innovators spot innovators — and why your best HR move is letting your existing serial innovators sit in on hires
• The career-phase development model: hard problems early, breadth via exposure, apprenticeship over mentorship, and burnout as a real risk if you don’t choose your battles
• Golden handcuffs — and the “fur-lined mousetrap” most serial innovators eventually walk into
• The Dennis-and-Andy story at DEMACO/SAIC — and what Dennis did right that almost every other manager gets wrong
• The pheasant hunting in Iowa metaphor — why over-managed budgets leave no nesting ground for the future of your business
• The five things a manager has to do — air cover, patience, running interference, no bureaucratic J work, no daily progress reports
• Why phase-gate control is the slow death of breakthrough innovation
• Where Bruce respectfully diverges from Clay Christensen on whether innovation can survive inside the organisation — or has to be spun out
• The incentive traps that quietly destroy serial innovators — and why “I’m doing what’s best for the company and you’re giving me crap for it” is the line every serial innovator says to themselves at least once
Chapters:
00:00 Executive Innovator Balance
00:37 Sponsor Message
01:03 Serial Innovators Intro
01:08 HR Screening Problem
03:02 Four Engagement Filters
04:46 Engaging With Problems
05:28 Projects Tenacity
06:29 Business Mindset
07:16 People And Customers
08:33 Research Method War Room
10:46 Five Core Traits
12:12 Innovators Spot Innovators
14:05 Career Phases 0 To 10
17:06 Hard Problems Early
17:58 Apprenticeship Model
18:52 Burnout And Choosing Battles
22:33 Innovator Versus Inventor
24:24 Nurturing Through Exposure
27:05 Budget Barriers Story
29:59 AI Hiring And Hidden Signals
31:44 HR Triads And Policy Limits
33:04 Golden Handcuffs Risk
34:34 Managing For Impact Setup
35:52 Relational Management Style
37:41 Innovation As Dance
38:09 Incentives And Motivation
40:51 Demco SAIC Case Study
44:08 Pheasant Metaphor Budgets
47:12 Avoiding J Work
49:55 Manager Air Cover Tips
52:03 Phase Gates And Control
55:53 Ego And Incentive Traps
59:54 Christensen Inside Vs Spinout
01:03:58 Pi Shaped Innovators
01:08:16 No Excuses Innovation Preview
01:11:33 Wrap Up And Where To Find
About Bruce Vojak
Bruce is co-author of Serial Innovators and Innovation Code, founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, and former Associate Dean for Administration at the University of Illinois College of Engineering. He advises executive teams and boards on how to find, support and unleash serial innovators inside mature firms.
Website: https://breakthrough-innovation-advisors.com
Book: Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen — 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker, author of Undisruptable — where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Conversations with the world’s leading authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, transformation, leadership, AI, creativity and the ideas shaping tomorrow.
About the host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable (Wiley). Learn more or enquire about booking him for a keynote: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen/
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Serial Innovators, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Follow and listen:
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io
About the host: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen
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.
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.
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.
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.
Creativity is not a gift. It is a skill. Jeff and Staney DeGraff return for part two of the DeGraff trilogy with The Creative Mindset — and the six-step CREATE method (Clarify, Replicate, Elaborate, Associate, Translate, Evaluate) that turns ordinary teams into compounding inventors.
What if innovation doesn’t come from alignment—but from constructive conflict? In this episode of The Innovation Show, Aidan McCullen explores The Innovation Code with Jeff and Staney DeGraff, revealing how breakthrough ideas emerge when opposing perspectives collide. Learn the four innovation archetypes—Artist, Engineer, Athlete, and Sage—and how to harness tension to drive creativity, adaptability, and long-term success.
What if your organisation could think and act like an octopus? In this episode, Steven Wunker and Jonathan Brill explore how AI is reshaping organisations through distributed intelligence, autonomy, and faster decision-making. Discover why success with AI depends less on technology—and more on rethinking culture, structure, and how decisions are made.