The Innovation Show

"Nobody ever measured management properly." Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg has spent a lifetime taking management myths out of sight for the sake of insight. The McGill professor and Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient joins Aidan McCullen to discuss his new book, Bust Those Management Myths, and explains why the effective strategies are learned as much as they are planned.
In this conversation, Henry Mintzberg reveals:
• Why the flat earth theory works perfectly well for building runways in Holland
• How the Egg McMuffin splits a class of managers down the middle on what strategy is
• The bees and flies in a bottle, and why too many bees are making strategy
• What Wayne Gretzky meant when he said he skates to where the puck is going to be
• Why top and middle management are dangerous metaphors
• Chains, hubs, webs and sets, explained through a wedding
• Why MBA programmes graduate technocrats who measure like mad
• The single disconnect behind eight of the book's myths
Chapters
00:00 Strategy Position vs Perspective
01:49 Meet Henry Mintzberg
03:33 Myth Our Theory Is True
05:37 Updating Theories Over Time
07:20 Measurement Madness Myth
09:16 Strategy as Position and Perspective
11:15 Myth Strategies Are Planned
15:34 Intuition Experience and Bees
20:29 Myth Beyond Hierarchy
23:10 Chains Hubs Webs Sets
27:49 Management Art Craft Science
30:26 Targets Disconnect and Context
32:54 Left Brain Right Brain
Resources
Bust Those Management Myths (Berrett-Koehler): https://bkconnection.com/products/9798890571724_bust-those-management-myths
MythSite, the book's companion site: https://mythsite.org
Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right (HBR, 1976): https://hbr.org/1976/07/planning-on-the-left-side-and-managing-on-the-right
Rebalancing Society: https://rebalancingsociety.org
Henry's website and blog: https://mintzberg.org
About Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg holds the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal and is a recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award. Bust Those Management Myths is his twenty-second book. Others include The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Managers Not MBAs, Simply Managing and Rebalancing Society.
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). Learn more at 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
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Website: 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

Your company is spending real money on AI and the CFO wants to know what it is getting back. David Rogers calls the awkward silence that follows the AI value gap.
David Rogers wrote the first book on digital transformation. He returns to The Innovation Show to unpack the AI value gap, drawing on a Harvard Business Review article he co-wrote with Krishnan Sankaranarayanan, who leads AI transformation at Eastman. When AI fails to show up in the financial results, David traces the shortfall to strategy, and he shows leaders how to fix it.
In this conversation, David Rogers reveals:
• Why one minute saved by AI vanishes in one company and transforms another
• The AI value equation, and why its three factors multiply
• Why handing AI to a team with no P&L ownership kills the return
• The "magic wand" myth that frontier labs sell to executives
• How AI drones cut plant downtime by 30 to 40 percent in oil and gas
• Why Netflix points its AI at customer retention instead of acquisition
• How two chemical companies in the same industry need completely different AI bets
• The one discipline to apply before you start any AI pilot
Chapters
00:00 What is a value driver?
01:45 Why AI fails to show up in financial results
03:00 The AI value gap and the awkward CFO conversation
08:10 Why one minute saved can vanish or transform a business
12:30 The AI value equation
15:00 Four reasons companies skip strategic alignment
23:40 Step one, define your value drivers
27:10 Step two, know where you sit in the value chain
30:30 Step three, trace opportunities to the income statement
33:00 Step four, decide how you will measure financial return
34:40 Listener question on AI adoption and organisational change
37:40 Strategy is your moat
39:00 David's next book on transformation in the AI era
Resources
The AI Value Gap Is a Strategy Problem: https://davidrogersdigital.substack.com/p/the-ai-value-gap-is-a-strategy-problem
Harvard Business Review article: https://bit.ly/HBR-Value-Gap-SS
David's website: https://davidrogers.digital
David's books: https://www.amazon.ie/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ADavid%2BL.%2BRogers
More from David Rogers on The Innovation Show
The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efliq61GF9M
The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 2: https://youtu.be/Wd5Av-8ME6Y
Digital Transformation Playbook (10 Years On): https://youtu.be/z7eNk-J0KV0
About David Rogers
David Rogers is a globally recognised authority on digital transformation and a longtime faculty member at Columbia Business School. He is the author of The Digital Transformation Roadmap, The Digital Transformation Playbook and The Network Is Your Customer.
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). Learn more at 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
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

"Nintendo unlocked a completely underserved market by simplifying the game console." Alexander Osterwalder
Alexander Osterwalder returns to The Innovation Show with a world first. The co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas shares the Value Stack, a brand new tool built on six patterns of value creation. Strategyzer has stopped writing books. Alex explains why the team has moved to applied playbooks, and how the patterns help any team articulate its value proposition and then test which benefit matters most to customers.
What Alex shares in this episode
- Why Nintendo won a huge new market with an inferior console
- How Henry Ford turned a handcrafted luxury into a car his own factory workers could buy
- Why trust was a feature for Airbnb and the entire proposition for FedEx overnight
- How Google Ads rescued advertisers from wasting half their budget
- Why Salesforce Trailblazers prove identity builders work in B2B, well beyond Harley-Davidson
- How Diners Club invented the credit card proposition from nothing
- Why Amazon Web Services scores on two patterns at once
- Why Strategyzer swapped dense books for playbooks
Chapters
00:00 Wii Ease Booster Hook
00:41 Sponsor Kyndryl
01:18 Guest Intro Value Stack
02:18 From Books to Playbooks
02:56 Six Value Patterns Overview
04:18 Ease Boosters Nintendo Wii
05:54 Access Boosters Ford Model T
06:48 Confidence Builders Trust
07:38 Value Catalysts Google Ads
08:20 Identity Builders Communities
08:54 Market Shapers Credit Cards
09:57 Playbook Demo and Discount
10:43 Giveaway and Where to Find
12:00 Events Closing Thanks
12:40 Sponsor Outro Kyndryl
Get 20% off Strategyzer playbooks at https://www.strategyzer.com with the code INNOVATIONSHOW20.
Win a digital copy of The Invincible Company. Name the gentleman on Alex's slide (he co-authored one of Alex's first books) by replying to the Thursday Thought, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Alex joins Aidan in Dublin on 1 and 2 December for Enterprise Ireland client sessions. Looking for a keynote speaker on innovation or change in Ireland that week? Get in touch at https://theinnovationshow.io
About the Guest
Alexander Osterwalder is the co-founder of Strategyzer and the inventor of the Business Model Canvas. He is lead author of Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design and The Invincible Company. https://www.strategyzer.com
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). Learn more about Aidan: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
Website: 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

"If there's something that's terrible, it's this fuzzy value proposition with AI slop."
Alex Osterwalder, co-founder of Strategyzer and inventor of the Business Model Canvas, returns to The Innovation Show with a field report on AI value proposition design. A few weeks ago he argued that AI should never replace the human struggle of value proposition work. Drawing on recent work with a large client's product owners and product managers, he now shows Aidan McCullen where AI earns its place, once a team has done the homework that gives a language model something worth working with.
In this conversation, Alex reveals:
- The four evidence-backed artifacts every team needs before AI writes a word of its value proposition
- Why high-level input to an LLM produces high-level output, and how to stop it
- How Strategyzer fed its own customer profiles and value stacks into AI and was surprised by the hero copy that came back
- The Value Stack, a new tool that sorts benefits into a key value driver, supporting benefits and table stakes
- What Gmail's one gigabyte of free storage in 2004 teaches about the single benefit that brings customers to you
- Why a large European marketing team demoted its own "differentiators" to table stakes the first time it used the Value Stack
- How the marketer's job shifts towards overseeing AI, much as software developers now oversee coding agents
- Why agents can run 100 customer interviews in an hour yet still cannot decide what to build
- The reason Alex says AI has no taste, and what that means for product judgment
Chapters:
00:00 Sponsor Message
00:22 Why AI For Value Props
01:44 Field Insights And Demand
03:26 Homework Before AI
04:43 Four Core Artifacts
06:33 Generating Assets With AI
08:10 Marketers As Overseers
10:01 Value Stack Explained
15:15 Agents And Human Judgment
17:41 Wrap Up And Giveaway
18:55 Sponsor Closing Notes
About Alex Osterwalder: CEO and Founder of Strategyzer, inventor of the Business Model Canvas, and lead author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. Explore his tools at https://www.strategyzer.com. And I am biased but a damn good guy!
Win a digital copy of Value Proposition Design, with thanks to Kyndryl. Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack to enter: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Get 20% off the Strategyzer platform with code INNOVATIONSHOW20 at https://www.strategyzer.com
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.
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). Learn more at 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, with conversations on disruption, innovation, change, transformation, leadership and AI.
Website: 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

"You know how I know what the real culture of a company is? [Two] things. Who gets the money and who gets promoted."
Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Strategy is Destiny and Inside Corporate Innovation, returns to The Innovation Show to discuss how companies renew themselves from the middle. His new paper with Sasanka Sekhar Chanda revisits three Intel decisions through James March's model of exploration and exploitation. Top management keeps backing an autonomous initiative while it teaches the company something new, and support stops when the learning stops.
In this conversation, Robert reveals:
- The fab capacity rule that moved Intel from memory chips into microprocessors years before top management recognised the shift
- Why a margin rule told him more about Intel's culture than any values statement, and how the same logic cost Intel the iPhone chip
- How Andy Grove spent $750 million on ProShare video conferencing, a business that never passed about $30 million
- Why Intel's own people called its RISC processor a YARP, years before ARM made the architecture dominant in mobile
- The Grove line that sank Intel's networking pitch
- Why the burden of proof always sits with the innovator
- The people map that helped build Nike's women's business, and why Infosys Consulting needed one
- How to spot a strategic inflection point by watching the rate of change in growth
- What a 3M executive told him about the famous 15% time
- Why the parking lot on Friday nights and Saturday mornings reveals your real innovators
Chapters:
00:00 Growth Problems Insight
01:18 Culture Money Promotions
02:31 Intel Weeds Seeds Setup
05:12 Three Intel Cases
10:02 Cognitive Rules ProShare
20:43 Define Autonomous Strategy
30:26 Intel Capacity Rule Shift
39:22 Strategic Context Battle
47:25 People Mapping Politics
53:58 Signals Inflection Derivative
57:00 Encouraging Autonomy 3M
01:02:46 Tragic Heroes Conclusion
01:05:16 Where To Find Paper
Read the paper (Stanford GSB working paper): https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/autonomous-strategic-behavior-organizational-learning-top
Robert Burgelman at Stanford GSB: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/robert-burgelman
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.
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, with conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
Website: 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