I spent yesterday morning on a stage in Vienna, at the Drucker Forum, in a room full of people who think about innovation for a living.
Here's what perspective I shared with them:
I think innovation as a mindset. As a result, the real barrier to it has nothing to do with money or resources. It’s the person at the top, still leading as the version of themselves that won the last chapter.
Every organisation runs on a shared set of perceptions:
That shared perception is the context, and the leader’s real job is to shift it, from innovation as a threat to defend against into something normal and safe to attempt. That’s a mindset shift before it’s a strategy. Here’s how it happens, in four stages.
Stage one: recognise it
A strategic adjustment is tuning your moves inside the same game. A fundamental shift is admitting the current path won’t get you to the future you want, no matter how hard you push.
The tell is simple. You’re working more and moving the company less. Pushing harder buys only marginal gains. The hard part is that the early signals are quiet, and leaders tend to act only once it’s obvious to everyone.
Kodak is the warning. Their own research confirmed in the early 1980s that digital would replace film within a decade. They saw it, years early. And still they asked how digital could serve the old model, rather than what a new company should look like. Their problem was never seeing the future. It was the willingness to dismantle the identity they’d built for a century.
Stage two: reorient yourself
This is where the real work sits, and it’s personal. You have to let go of the achieved self, the identity built for the last context
Each built a real career. Each, under pressure, blocks the reinvention.
Reorienting isn’t inventing a persona. You name the default you reach for under pressure. You decide what you refuse to betray, the core that stays. You decide what to retire, the strength that’s become your ceiling. Then you make the new stance unmistakable, and live it consistently enough that people feel it, not just hear it.
Satya Nadella’s first move at Microsoft wasn’t a restructure. He asked a hundred-thousand-person company to follow a leadership built on empathy and curiosity, which contradicted everything it had rewarded for a decade. He changed first. The company followed.
Stage three: mobilise
Here I’d push back on a word leaders love. Urgency. Urgency is how we think we move people, and it often does the opposite, because fear breeds confusion and silence.
What moves people is radical clarity. You say, plainly and often, what you stand for and the few things you’ll protect no matter what. That’s the message, and it has to be unmistakable.
The other half is presence, the felt experience of your standards. People read your behaviour as the real strategy. Two standards matter more than any programme. When something is wrong, name it out loud. And protect the people who try something new and fail, so no one pays a price for it.
Then, on Monday morning, you make it real. Give away a decision you’d normally keep. Fund one genuine experiment and shield it from the organisation’s antibodies. Innovation you don’t fund or protect is a slogan.
Stage four: keep reinventing
The last mistake is treating reinvention as a one-off. Every inflection point is a chance to do it again, a new competitor, a technology like AI. The strongest leaders don’t wait for those moments. They create them.
Netflix reinvented at every turn, from DVDs to streaming to original content. Blockbuster’s John Antioco, with a hardened identity around discipline and the profit model, reportedly laughed when Netflix offered to sell for fifty million dollars. He waited for a crisis that proved terminal. Same market. Different relationship with letting go.
Final thoughts
Reinvention at the top is personal before it’s organisational, and it’s true at every level, not only the corner office.
So before the next strategy offsite, sit with three questions:
Because if you want the people around you to reinvent, the first thing that has to change is you.
One idea a week on how top CEOs lead when the stakes are high, from inside rooms most people never enter. Free, and you can leave any time.