The Ultimate Strategy Is “be good” a part of your 2021 strategy? If not, you should reconsider. When I was in business school, we learned that companies exist to do one thing: maximize shareholder value. At Outthinker, we’ve been talking for years about how this belief has become defunct. Companies are realizing that focusing solely

Last week I got to spend five and a half hours with one of the most influential strategic thinkers alive today, Gary Hamel. He has written five global best-selling books, published 17 papers in Harvard Business Review, and has taught at London Business School for 30 years.

We are dealing with unprecedented change invoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. What we need more than ever is a sense of hope. So, we’ve taken The Outthinker Process – a strategic process that helps business leaders step outside of conventional thinking to redesign their business models and strategies – and reformed it specifically for what

The word “strategy” too often brings to mind images of uptight executives in boardrooms, with heavy binders and spreadsheets, debating critical choices. Experts will tell you strategy is “a plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” Strategy is a science, and it’s serious.

This week, I was in Erie, PA, then Chicago, now I’m in Seattle to present two talks. Stepping out of the arrivals area at the Seattle–Tacoma Airport activated a vivid memory of stopping at the seating area there, eight years ago, to conduct a phone interview with Time Magazine. A few weeks later, my photo

I’m angry, not jetlagged. It’s 4:30am and I’m banging on the keyboard from my hotel room desk when I should be asleep, fueling for a keynote I deliver to a thousand electronics executives in four hours. What tossed me out of bed and pulled me to my laptop was not the three-hour time difference between New York

  Wind blowing the sounds of trumpets, laughter, and dinner parties across the Savannah River makes my perch on my hotel balcony feel like it’s at the center of this historic city. Tonight I flew from a workshop for a group of women executives in Miami to Savannah, Ga., where I will keynote for a software company’s

This week I ran three days of workshops for PVH (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, etc.) and UTC (the huge tech firm that makes everything from Otis elevators to NASA space suits). In the gaps of time I’ve been working on defining the name for my next book, which has led to researching the word “innovation.”

If my family ever reads this blog, please know that I love you dearly and I carefully memorize each cherished moment I spend with you. And yet, this morning, silent in my hotel room outside of suburban Philadelphia, commuters’ headlights floating slowly across wet streets, I feel complete and alone. You see, it’s been a

The Virgin America lounge at LAX, clinks of drinks, CNN humming in the background, and a distant rumble of planes landing and leaving gently marking the end of a stimulating two days facilitating 36 of ABC’s most senior television executives. Heads of news, comedy, daytime, digital, sales, and more, all filling one room with creative