Most organisations have plenty of ideas. Scaling them is where innovation dies, says Harvard’s Linda Hill.
Linda Hill is a Harvard Business School professor, an ethnographer of leadership, and co-author of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press) with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild. Her earlier book Collective Genius studied leaders at Pixar and beyond who build organisations able to innovate time and again. Genius at Scale goes further, into large, old, regulated organisations that research says are hostile to innovation. The result is the ABC framework of Architects, Bridgers and Catalysts.
In this conversation, Linda Hill reveals: • Why leading innovation is a different job from leading change • What a hospital CEO in Abu Dhabi meant by “leading through a fog” • How 400 to 500 nurses ran A/B experiments to improve their own operations • Why only 4 of 91 CEOs and C-suite leaders would accept the innovation job Ajay Banga offered at MasterCard • The three roles of Architect, Bridger and Catalyst, and the practices behind each • Why Microsoft’s Copilot depends on bridgers inside both Microsoft and OpenAI • How Renault’s CEO tried to build a citizen movement behind electric vehicles • Why bridgers rarely get the credit, and what leaders owe them
Chapters 00:00 Scaling Innovation Challenge 01:39 Episode Setup and Giveaway 02:24 Meet Linda Hill 05:28 Collective Genius Origins 08:27 From Innovation to Scale 11:55 COVID Innovation Ecosystems 16:09 Leading Through the Fog 21:17 Hospital Innovation Architecture 23:26 Mastercard Reluctant Innovators 29:51 ABCs Architect Bridger Catalyst 36:18 Bridger Work and Recognition 41:45 Wrap Up and Sponsor
Win a copy of Genius at Scale. Watch on YouTube, spot the colour of the two books on Linda’s desk, and answer in the comments or reply to the Thursday Thought, with thanks to Kyndryl. https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Read Linda’s article at the Kyndryl Institute, Why continuous modernization demands more than just technology change https://www.kyndryl.com/gb/en/institute/2026/09/continuous-modernization
About the Host Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com
Website https://theinnovationshow.io Thursday Thought https://thethursdaythought.substack.com YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen