Thinkers & Ideas

In Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation, Linda A. Hill argues that innovation fails not because companies lack ideas, but because they struggle to scale those ideas across the enterprise—and that the solution lies not in structure or processes, but in leadership.Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative, and one of the top ten management thinkers in the world as ranked by Thinkers50. In her new book, co-authored with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild, she draws on deep case studies of organizations from Mastercard to Pfizer to Pixar to show that scaling innovation requires three distinct but complementary leadership roles: architects, bridgers, and catalysts.In her conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute, she discusses why innovation labs alone don’t work, the ABCs of innovation leadership, how to build a culture of creative abrasion, and why even senior leaders need coaching to get innovation right.Key topics discussed: 01:28 | Why innovation fails at the point of scaling, not ideation03:59 | The ABCs of innovation leadership: architects, bridgers, catalysts06:29 | Getting metrics and incentives right for innovation10:42 | What bridgers do and why organizations don’t have enough of them14:33 | Is innovation leadership a team sport or a solo act?18:48 | How to know which role you’re best suited to and how to learn the others24:04 | How incumbent leaders can create urgency without being the new CEOAdditional inspirations from Linda A. Hill:Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)Article: Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale, co-authored by Emily Tedards and Jason Wild (March–April 2026 issue of Harvard Business Review)

In Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business, Marcus Buckingham argues that love—not engagement, satisfaction, or motivation—is the only feeling that reliably changes the behavior of employees and customers, and that it can be deliberately designed into business.Buckingham is one of the world’s foremost researchers on human performance. He is a former senior vice president at Gallup turned New York Times–best-selling author, having written First, Break All the Rules. In his new book, he draws on decades of research to show that the relationship between experiences and outcomes is not linear—only experiences so positive that people describe them as “love” actually drive loyalty, productivity, and advocacy.In his conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses why love is categorically different from engagement, the five feelings that make up a loving experience, three disciplines leaders can use to design love into their organizations, and why common practices like outsourcing and large spans of control are fundamentally unloving.Key topics discussed: 01:16 | Why love is categorically different from engagement or satisfaction04:43 | The nonlinear relationship between experiences and outcomes08:24 | How experiences drive behaviors that drive outcomes12:34 | Designing love in: the five feelings and three disciplines16:00 | Can love be designed into products, not just experiences?19:13 | The three disciplines: walk the stage, equip the people, sequence the scenes27:39 | Spans of control and the one-to-12 rule30:17 | The limits of artificial experience–makingAdditional inspirations from Marcus Buckingham:First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Gallup Press, 2016)

In this special episode, Rich Lesser, BCG’s global chair, and Martin Reeves, former chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, reflect on the shocks and surprises that shaped the first half of the decade and what they reveal about the future. They explore the traits leaders need today: building trust, staying geopolitically aware, and adopting AI in a people-centered way.

In The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations, B. Joseph Pine II argues that an economic shift is underway, in which transformations—not commodities, goods, services, or experiences—will become the highest form of value creation.Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, known for having coined the term “experience economy” in the 1990s. He works as a speaker and advisor to Fortune 500 companies. In his new book, he suggests that most companies compete by improving what they sell, while missing what customers actually want: to become different people.In his conversation with Adam Job, senior director at the BCG Henderson Institute, Pine discusses the evolution of economic value creation, the North Star for transformation businesses, and how to scale from one to many transformation journeys.Key topics discussed: 01:01 | The evolution of economic value creation03:35 | How to get into the transformation business10:35 | The North Star for transformation businesses15:07 | Scaling beyond individual transformation journeys16:46 | Different types of transformation journeys20:37 | Making transformations last24:12 | Taking the first step toward the transformation economyAdditional inspirations from B. Joseph Pine II:The Experience Economy, With a New Preface by the Authors: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money, co-authored by James H. Gilmore (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019)

In The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder, Eswar Prasad argues that we are caught in a destructive feedback loop between economics, domestic politics, and geopolitics.Prasad is a professor of Trade Policy and Economics at Cornell University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In his new book, he explores how globalization, international institutions, the rise of “middle power” countries, and technological innovations had the potential to promote shared prosperity—but instead are driving global instability.In his conversation with Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses the breakdown of the rule-based system, implications for trade policy in Europe and elsewhere, and the role AI plays in driving global instability.Key topics discussed: 01:20 | The doom loop driving global instability06:41 | The positive aspects of globalization and middle powers12:02 | Implications for European trade policy15:51 | The breakdown of the rule-based system18:36 | The role of AI and other technologies in the doom loop23:57 | Reasons for remaining optimisticAdditional inspirations from Eswar Prasad:The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2023)