Insight Editions · No. 273
Genius at Scale
How Great Leaders Drive Innovation
Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards & Jason Wild
Hill, Tedards and Wild show how leaders scale innovation beyond a single team, treating it as cocreation, with cases of organisations that built the culture and capabilities to innovate again and again.
A study guide to Genius at Scale by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards & Jason Wild. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
Hill, Tedards and Wild argue that great leaders drive innovation at scale by sharing the driver's seat: they build the willingness and ability of many people, inside and beyond their organizations, to collaborate, experiment and learn together. Leading innovation is not marshaling followers but architecting cocreation at home, bridging it across partnerships, and catalyzing it through whole ecosystems.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Sharing the Driver's Seat | Innovation is cocreation; the ABCs extend Collective Genius beyond the firm |
| 1 | Ajay Banga at Mastercard | One CEO architects culture, delegates bridging, catalyzes financial inclusion |
| 2 | Michael Ku at Pfizer | A middle manager builds the community behind the record-speed Covid vaccine trial |
| 3 | Kathy Fish at P&G | GrowthWorks lean experimentation, plus new incentives and leader questions |
| 4 | Mihaljevic and Suri at CCAD | An 87-nationality hospital learns how to learn, then hyper-empowers staff in Covid |
| 5 | Nicole M. Jones at Delta | The Hangar: bridgers build mutual trust, influence and commitment |
| 6 | Raja Al Mazrouei at DIFC | The Fintech Hive: curate, translate, integrate banks, startups, regulators |
| 7 | Lyons and Moore at Mastercard Labs | Bridgers as social APIs, upgraded as Labs moves from outpost to core |
| 8 | Fukabori and Kajitani at avatarin | Junior engineers use an XPRIZE to launch an avatar movement and spin-out |
| 9 | Ndidi Nwuneli at AFC | Mapping by doing reveals a trust gap; a vetted SME community closes it |
| 10 | Bottura, Gilmore and family | Seeding: canvases for chefs, alumni restaurants, 13 refettorios |
| 11 | The Nayars at Sampark | Cultivating: frugal kits, Didi and Sampark TV reach 15 million children |
| Epi | Cristina Ventura at White Star | A chief catalyst officer models the wayfinder's personal disciplines |
The argument in brief
- Innovation is cocreation. It is a process of collaboration (diversity of thought and constructive conflict), experimentation (hypotheses, false starts, pivots) and learning (reflection and adaptation), not a solo genius's flash. The book extends Hill's Collective Genius (2014), whose in-house paradigm "did not go far enough" for a world where value is created across organizations.
- Three roles, the ABCs. Architects build the culture and capabilities for cocreation inside an organization; bridgers make partnerships with very different outsiders work through curation, translation and integration; catalysts launch movements across ecosystems by mapping, seeding and cultivating. Leaders must hold tensions throughout: aspiration and pragmatism, individual and collective ambition, support and confrontation, short and long term, structure and agility.
- One CEO, all three roles. Ajay Banga at Mastercard (2010-2020) architected a "decency quotient" culture and a 50/25/25 Grow, Diversify, Build portfolio, delegated bridging to an acquired entrepreneur at Mastercard Labs, and catalyzed a financial-inclusion drive reaching 500 million people early, while market value rose from $27 billion to nearly $335 billion.
- Architects (Part One). At regulated, risk-averse incumbents, leaders changed structures and, above all, their own behavior: Michael Ku turned Pfizer's clinical supply unit into a debating community (speaking last, tetrads, "collaboration is not consensus") that delivered the Covid vaccine trial; Kathy Fish built GrowthWorks lean experimentation at P&G and replaced verdicts with four learning questions; Tom Mihaljevic and Rakesh Suri built a learning community of 5,000 people from 87 countries at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi and "hyper-empowered" it through Covid.
- Bridgers (Part Two). Middle managers who influence without authority by building mutual trust, influence and commitment: Nicole Jones at Delta's Hangar (biometric boarding in 90 days), Raja Al Mazrouei at DIFC's Fintech Hive (25 banks at one table), and Garry Lyons and Ken Moore at Mastercard Labs, the company's "social APIs" who moved Labs from outpost to core with sponsors, eight-week funnels and DFV tests.
- Catalysts (Part Three). Leaders, often with little formal power, who create conditions for a collective agenda to emerge: two junior ANA engineers behind avatarin; Ndidi Nwuneli, whose ventures mapped a hidden trust gap among Africa's food SMEs; Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore, who seeded chefs and refettorios by building canvases and letting talent go; and Vineet and Anupama Nayar, who cultivated a chain of catalysts (Sparks, teachers, officials, parents) around frugal products at $1 per child.
- The throughline is development. Digital tools sustain interactions at scale, but the leaders' real work is developing themselves and others. The epilogue's wayfinder, Cristina Ventura, shows the personal disciplines: know your "why," dare to try, connect the dots, let values guide you, with abundance, curiosity, generosity and tenacity.
Sharing the Driver's Seat
Hill, Tedards and Wild set out to answer one question: how do great leaders drive innovation at scale? Their short answer is that they share the driver's seat. Innovation almost never comes from a lone genius's "aha" moment; it is a process of cocreation, and today's leaders must spark it inside their organizations, at their boundaries and across whole ecosystems.
Why innovation is now an imperative
Leading innovation has always been hard, hardest of all in successful corporations, where simply executing the core business consistently takes most of the energy. For a long time innovation was treated as an add-on; the authors argue it has become an imperative. Firms that fail to innovate fall behind rivals who find cheaper or better ways to deliver value, and communities and nations that fail to innovate cannot solve the social, political and environmental problems that threaten them.
The new CEO of an established financial services firm, told to future-proof the company against digital-first competitors, asked an entrepreneur who had just arrived through an acquisition to stay and help lead the effort. The entrepreneur hesitated but agreed. Together they turned the firm into a technology company in payments, built innovation into its culture, struck unconventional partnerships and assembled a global ecosystem of corporations, startups, governments and civil society. In one decade market capitalization rose tenfold, and billions of people gained access to the formal economy. (The firm is Mastercard; its story returns in chapters 1 and 7.) When Hill first asked a Harvard Business School class whether they would have accepted the entrepreneur's assignment, only 3 of 85 executives raised their hands, even though they already knew how it ended.
The authors sympathize with that reluctance. The work is hard and risky, and no all-purpose road map exists for its increasingly complex terrain. Several forces sharpen the problem:
- Interdependence. Global crises have made organizations depend on one another, so innovating in silos no longer works.
- Technology. Emerging tools that were science fiction a short while ago have made "business as usual" obsolete.
- Speed. Fast movement is now mandatory; good ideas are plentiful, but execution is hard, costly and often feels too late.
Two questions follow and frame the book: how leaders can stir up in themselves and others the imagination and sense of possibility that continuous innovation needs, and how they can give people the nerve to act, rather than plan, their way into the future.
What the book shows: cocreation
The book follows exemplary leaders worldwide who built teams, organizations and ecosystems that kept generating innovative ideas and also scaled them. Scaling, in the authors' usage, means implementing an idea so it fulfils its intended purpose: for some leaders that meant launching new products and services, for others entering new markets or amplifying social impact. The settings are deliberately varied: startups, legacy companies, nonprofits, governments, family businesses and social enterprises.
Across them, the stories show that both ideation and implementation are cocreation: collaboration, experimentation and learning among people who see the world differently.
- Collaboration. Weaving together diversity of thought and constructive conflict so that a marketplace of ideas forms.
- Experimentation. Actively testing and refining hypotheses while accepting the false starts, failures and pivots that any new venture brings.
- Learning. Individuals and groups reflecting on what experiments revealed and adapting their course in response.
Leading innovation, then and now
The Collective Genius foundation
This book extends Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (2014), written by Hill with Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Lineback. At the time, research looked either at innovation or at leadership; that book studied where the two meet. It described leaders from Pixar to Volkswagen whose teams innovated repeatedly rather than once or twice. These leaders were visionaries, yet they saw their job as inviting others to cocreate the future, rather than getting people to follow them into it. They wanted everyone to see themselves as an innovator; one of them said each person holds a "slice of genius" waiting to be released for the collective good.
That stance came with a deliberately local definition of innovation, which this book keeps: anything new and useful to the team or organization, whether a product, service, business model or process, and whether incremental or breakthrough. In hindsight, the authors say, Collective Genius captured a paradigm shift in what good leadership means.
Why a new book
Hill kept doing fieldwork and added partners. By 2022 she and her collaborators had run longitudinal studies of leaders in 18 countries and 21 industries. The Collective Genius paradigm still held, but did not go far enough: the best leaders were now cocreating well beyond their own walls.
- Linda A. Hill. Harvard Business School professor and lead author of Collective Genius; the other two tease that she is the architect, obsessed with getting a place's culture right.
- Emily Tedards. Researcher who did much of the on-the-ground fieldwork; studies relations among business, government and civil society (energy transitions, economic development) and has built intergenerational forums at Harvard pairing graduate students with senior executives. Cast as the catalyst, alert to how interconnected the world is.
- Jason Wild. Practitioner who worked at IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft; met Hill when she studied IBM for Collective Genius and moved over a decade from research subject to co-investigator. His repeated lesson: innovation is more about people than technology. Cast as the bridger, always connecting tools and talent.
The authors add that each of them switched roles while writing, which they believe sharpened their reading of the leaders they studied.
The evidence base
- Field time. Thousands of hours observing leaders and teams up close, often for years.
- Interviews. Hundreds of in-depth interviews (many on video calls because of the pandemic) plus company records.
- Sample. Leaders met early and late in their careers: senior executives, middle managers, individual contributors and entrepreneurs, in consumer products, health care, aviation, high tech, agribusiness and education.
- Literature. A posted bibliography of more than 700 books and articles.
The mission was to understand who these leaders are, what they do and how they think and behave; the framework below emerged from their stories.
The ABCs of leading innovation
Whether producing a vaccine in record time or extending financial services to billions of unbanked people, the standout leaders got multiple organizations to collaborate, experiment and learn together. They treated emerging technologies as tools for unleashing collective genius at scale, rather than as threats; the authors shorten this to genius at scale. It means more than activating collective genius in-house: it means forging partnerships and strategic movements that spread cocreation across sectors (companies, government, civil society) or across the globe.
Architects
The foundational role: architects build innovative communities ready to cocreate inside the organization and, later, beyond it. They know innovation cannot be mandated, so they change the social environment in which people work. Two things get built:
- Willingness. Shared purpose, values and rules of engagement create a sense of community that makes people want to innovate.
- Ability. Helping colleagues amplify and handle their diversity of thought and overcome fear of risk and failure embeds the capacity to collaborate, experiment and learn.
Architects watch for emotional, intellectual and organizational barriers. Typical diagnostic questions: are silos blocking collaboration; do performance or talent systems punish risk-taking; do people have the digital tools and data to experiment and learn fast; and, often most important, is leadership itself the problem, with leaders getting in the way?
Bridgers
Organizations now depend on external talent and tools to reach the future. Bridgers make cocreation work between insiders and outside partners, with influence but no formal authority. Partners often differ sharply in priorities, constraints, capabilities and work styles, so bridgers build relationships of mutual trust, influence and commitment through three activities: they curate partners carefully, translate between them to build shared understanding, and integrate their separate intentions and actions so new products, services and processes can be built and scaled. The work is hands-on, slow and often invisible, and because working with outsiders feels riskier, it demands high emotional intelligence, patience and diplomacy.
Catalysts
Catalysts galvanize movements far beyond their organization:
- Map. Chart the ecosystem: its changing stakeholders and interdependencies, plus emerging opportunities and barriers.
- Seed. Create concrete chances for multiparty cocreation that meet each party's own priorities while advancing shared aims.
- Cultivate. Equip stakeholders with the mindsets, relationships and tools that keep the movement going over time.
Gatekeeping. The usual business and research reading: make your firm the central hub that controls information, resource flows and the customer interface in the value chain.
Catalyzing. The book's leaders stress synergies, sustainability and shared value, growing the ecosystem so all members gain.
The roles complement one another. Leaders often play several, or deliberately take one and delegate the others to trusted colleagues; each story in the book is told through the leader's primary role.
A road map to genius at scale
- Chapter 1. All three ABCs at once: the Mastercard CEO transforming culture and seizing the digital future with parties inside and outside the firm.
- Part I, architects in legacy organizations. Pfizer (ch. 2) reinvents its clinical supply chain for a digital world; Procter & Gamble (ch. 3) adopts an experimentation operating model to answer competitive threats faster; Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi (ch. 4) builds a workforce that learns and adapts a care model 7,000 miles from US headquarters. These cases expose the headwinds: entrenched mindsets, routines and discomfort with digital tools and data, including the leaders' own mental models.
- Part II, bridgers. Delta Air Lines (ch. 5), the Dubai International Financial Centre (ch. 6) and Mastercard again (ch. 7) work the messy junctions of corporations, startups and regulators.
- Part III, catalysts in entrepreneurial ventures. avatarin (ch. 8), African Food Changemakers (ch. 9), the Francescana Family (ch. 10) and Sampark Foundation (ch. 11) took a systemic view from the start, aiming at industries, sectors, regions and nations.
- Epilogue. The first executive the authors met titled "chief catalyst officer," whose zigzag path through luxury, technology and venture capital invites readers to prepare themselves to lead.
The pandemic detour and the method
The pandemic delayed the book: the authors chose to return to the field to watch their leaders cope, and saw human ingenuity at scale in saving companies, communities and lives. Covid-19 stories therefore recur, because they reveal how to lead in a more dynamic, complex and interconnected world.
- Aspiration and pragmatism.
- Individual and collective ambitions.
- Support and confrontation.
- Short- and long-term thinking.
- Structure and agility.
The book favors stories over theory, told from each leader's perspective with direct quotation. The authors stress that their leaders are far from perfect but are mastering a hard art; readers should study what they do, how they do it and why. Their closing argument: these leaders lead beyond formal authority, sharing the driver's seat with the communities, partnerships and movements they enable, and the world's existential challenges call for many more architects, bridgers and catalysts.
The cases are chosen as exemplars and told largely in the leaders' own words, so the book shows what success looked like rather than testing why similar efforts fail; there is no comparison group. The "3 of 85" classroom anecdote is a single informal show of hands, and Mastercard's tenfold market-cap rise also reflects the broad decade-long boom in payments and card-network stocks, so it is not attributable to the innovation agenda alone.
The ABCs of Leadership: Ajay Banga at Mastercard
Ajay Banga's decade as Mastercard CEO (2010 to 2020) shows all three roles in a single story: he architected a culture of cocreation, delegated bridging to an acquired entrepreneur, and acted as catalyst for a global financial-inclusion movement. Market capitalization rose from $27 billion to nearly $335 billion, but the authors insist the real story behind the numbers is a transformation of culture.
Banga's own view, quoted as the chapter's epigraph, was that culture is the company's biggest differentiator: the readiness of leaders to take thoughtful risks, push boundaries, feel competitive paranoia and act with urgency.
The starting point
When Banga took over in 2010 he believed digital technology was about to disrupt global payments and that Mastercard had to innovate to survive. Its 7,000 employees did not share the alarm: in a survey they ranked innovation 26th of 27 factors most important to the company's success. For Banga, the biggest threat sat inside the company's own walls: a conservative, consensus-driven culture whose people read past success, including a $13 billion market value after the 2006 IPO, as proof the culture worked. He saw two choices, evolve or die out. By the time he stepped down, the company was worth nearly $335 billion and had rebranded from a credit-card service to a "global technology company in the payments industry."
Over the decade he took steps many considered radical to remove internal barriers, adopt emerging technologies and embed new mindsets. He knew he could not do it alone and enlisted cadres of leaders throughout the firm. The chapter is organized around the three roles he played or delegated.
When culture gets in the way
The "Priceless" campaign made Mastercard look like a consumer brand, but for decades it had been a membership association, and even after becoming a private share corporation in 2002 it served a single customer: banks. Michael Miebach, then head of Middle East and Africa, called it successful but narrow, with an "organ-reject syndrome" toward new ideas, technologies and ways of working. Because its payments network was tightly regulated and helped run whole economies, leaders put security and reliability above everything.
Top-down decisions had stifled debate and bred conformity. Sachin Mehra, who joined in 2010 as group executive and treasurer (later CFO), recalled people walking into meetings and asking the boss what to do. Executive Michael Fiore said nobody would decide anything until it had gone up the chain and the CEO had approved. The authors see this pattern in many incumbents: respect for experience decays into compliance, and even talented people learn to "go along to get along" rather than risk confrontation.
The board knew about the culture but only after the 2008 financial crisis saw it as an existential threat. Chairman Richard Haythornthwaite framed the choice as battening down the hatches or fighting its way out. After interviewing several candidates he invited Banga to the UK and knew within twenty minutes he had his man: someone who could weigh the company's risks and still lead it into an aspirational future.
Who Banga was
Banga came from banking like his new colleagues, but his path was unusual; he later remarked that nobody who looked like him led a top-ten American company, and credited an enlightened board. Born into a Saini Sikh family in India, he graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, worked in sales, marketing and country management at Nestlé and then PepsiCo, joined Citigroup in 1996 and rose to CEO of its Asia-Pacific business. He was known for building multinationals that used global scale while tailoring customer experience to local conditions.
He inherited a market cap of $27 billion, double the IPO figure. Most new CEOs would have enjoyed the rising tide; Banga, like Haythornthwaite, sensed danger. Stakeholders' expectations were rising, competition was intensifying from incumbents (Visa, American Express) and digital-first players (Apple, Google, Alipay), and with little internal pressure to fight for deals, Mastercard had begun losing head-to-head contests. The problem he set himself: how to create urgency to innovate among colleagues who were dozing.
Architecting the environment
Banga framed leadership as inviting employees to create the future with him, not to follow his vision. His stated aim was a culture in which people saw themselves as "empowered agents of change." That required an environment for collaboration, experimentation and learning, and it meant purging the habit of stealing incremental market share from strong rivals in favor of higher collective aspirations: why the firm existed, whom it served and what it would do.
Purpose: a World Beyond Cash
Instead of fighting old rivals over the 15% of global payments that were already electronic, Banga pointed to the 85% still made in cash and checks, much of it by unbanked people and small businesses in emerging markets. The real competitor was cash itself. His "World Beyond Cash" moved attention from short-term card share and account wins to a much longer runway for growth, and matched his personal motto of "doing well" by "doing good." Haythornthwaite said he would have sold tickets to Banga's World Beyond Cash speech. Banga insisted financial inclusion was both a business imperative and a societal responsibility, achievable only through innovation.
- Grow (50% of money and management attention). Keep winning in the core payments business against Visa and others; authenticating and securing card transactions stayed central, and a stronger core strengthened everything else.
- Diversify (25%). New services and nontraditional customers, from corporations such as Walmart and Lufthansa to governments and small businesses in emerging markets; Banga called these customers the wellspring of creativity and of new capabilities.
- Build (25%). Entirely new businesses and revenue streams, requiring capabilities the firm did not yet have.
- Time horizons. Every budget had to include short-term (12 to 18 months), medium-term (18 months to 3 years) and long-term (4+ years) investments.
Mehra read the budget split as Banga putting his money where his mouth was, a signal that employees had better come along. CFO Martina Hund-Mejean backed it, telling staff they were building for the next hundred years, but there would be no hundred years without surviving the short term.
Talent: escaping shared blind spots
Grow was what the firm already knew, so Banga concentrated on the mindsets for diversify and build. That needed new technologies and a more diverse talent base than the usual North American ex-banker or consultant. People who have long worked and studied together, he argued, share the same blind spots, so he hired from government, nonprofits, consumer products and technology.
Values: the Mastercard Way
Diversity of perspective would feel uncomfortable in a consensus culture and invite conflict, so Banga unified the company around a new code of values, the Mastercard Way.
- Relentless customer focus (the core). Understand each customer's priorities, capabilities and constraints intimately, which in turn required embracing colleagues with different backgrounds; above all, be hungry to win their business. After a big lost deal, when the room said it had not wanted the deal anyway, Banga replied that no such deal exists, only one you could not figure out how to win at a useful price, and he would not listen to excuses.
- Sense of urgency. Complacency was the "worst enemy"; procrastination was not their friend. A colleague said there was no excuse for missing the numbers or for not advancing financial inclusion. When managers in other geographies sat on requests, he ruled that any request unanswered for seven days was automatically approved; the rule was rescinded once managers started replying promptly.
- Thoughtful risk-taking. The hardest value to embed, because fear of risk was deep-rooted and partly justified in a regulated business. CAO Timothy Murphy said Banga was never cavalier on risk: compliance, reliability and customer trust stayed paramount, yet he believed failure to act is itself a risk. Perfect knowledge was impossible, but judgment was not. He paid bonuses for well-reasoned risks that fell short and for people brave enough to kill their own projects and free resources.
- Decency quotient (DQ). The principle beneath all the others: decency as the base of the relationships and respect that drive innovation and enterprise-wide behavior, extending to employees' whole lives. Backed by competitive wages, equal pay for equal work, parental and bereavement leave, wider stock ownership and industry-leading retirement contributions; leaders were to treat leadership as a "privilege," not a preordained right.
Bridging across boundaries
Banga believed it was a fallacy that Mastercard could work out all the technology internally; the body had to absorb from outside until new capabilities entered its bloodstream. His bridger was Garry Lyons, an Irishman who had joined when Mastercard acquired his startup Orbiscom, a pioneer of virtual credit card numbers and blockchain in payments.
Banga's brief to Lyons: make the culture care about innovation, wake the company up to what was happening outside, be its eyes and ears, and scare the crap out of us. He gave Lyons a budget separate from corporate finance, a "moat" between Lyons and the CFO, and saw his own role as protecting him so nobody stood in his way. Lyons was told his job was to disrupt the CEO, that he would never need a spreadsheet to justify a project and that he answered only to Banga. Banga joked that Lyons could drink Guinness all day as long as he delivered two new launches every year, or everyone would be fired.
With autonomy and money, Lyons founded Mastercard Labs, a specialized innovation unit that grew into a global network of R&D labs and became, in Banga's phrase, the "bridge between the legacy and the new." Its work ran in two directions:
- Outward. Tracking technology trends through partnerships with tech companies, startups and venture capitalists, and hiring specialized talent to build new payments solutions with cutting-edge tools.
- Inward. Priming the core business to adopt Labs' offerings and innovate in their own jobs through awareness campaigns, upskilling sessions, hackathons and competitions, above all to get people involved.
By end of 2013 Labs had launched significant new digital products, but the metric Banga valued most was cultural: employees now ranked innovation the number 1 factor for Mastercard's future, up from 26th three years earlier. Lyons had changed the culture, so he was promoted.
When Lyons stepped down as chief innovation officer in 2018, Labs also ran a corporate accelerator and an innovation service for customers, and legacy systems had moved to a modular "API-first" design, letting partners across finance plug into Mastercard technology, including the engine behind Apple Pay and Google Pay. Successor Ken Moore built closer bridges among Labs, partners and the core (chapter 7 tells both men's story).
Catalyzing a movement
Bridging widened Mastercard's reach across the financial ecosystem and enabled cocreation on a scale Banga had not imagined in 2010. Inclusion needed banking, telecom and regulatory infrastructure built from scratch, which no single institution could carry. So Mastercard had to help governments, banks, fintech startups, telecom providers, nonprofits and civil society cocreate in new ways: the catalyst role.
Mobilizing them began with trust. Mastercard could not march into countries and dictate how to run their economies; Banga's line was that doing business in a country is not a birthright but is earned by creating value for its citizens. He personally took on winning the confidence of national governments, calling societal trust the foundation for operating anywhere. That meant redefining Mastercard's role from "gatekeeper at the heart of commerce" to "collaborative facilitator of commerce and economic opportunity."
- South Africa. With the government and private banks, monthly social-grant payments moved from cash to bank-issued Mastercard debit cards: within a year the banked population rose by 22 million (about 15%), 900,000 fraudulent recipients were removed and the government saved about $200 million.
- Nigeria. Partnership with the government to issue 13 million national e-ID cards.
- Center for Inclusive Growth. Set up after Nigeria to experiment with local partners on new distribution channels, micropayments and digital identity where power and telecom are unreliable.
- 2015 World Bank pledge. An unscripted public promise to bring 500 million people into the formal financial system by 2020, reached two years early.
- 2020 goals. Raised to 1 billion people, plus 25 million women entrepreneurs and 50 million micro and small businesses connected to the digital economy.
The authors stress that catalyst work paid commercially: it made Mastercard a trusted adviser to a widening set of nontraditional stakeholders and drove material business growth.
Making the case for the ABCs
Banga stepped down and handed over to Michael Miebach, who had helped turn the firm into a financially inclusive digital powerhouse. Market cap had risen tenfold. The story behind the numbers, the authors repeat, was culture. SVP Deborah Barta credited the top: without support and investment from the CEO, middle managers could not have changed the culture; Banga promoted it, spoke it and believed it.
The authors' reading of Banga's roles:
- Architect. A stage-setter who created an environment where employees were willing and able to join an exhilarating, taxing journey.
- Bridger by delegation. He saw the need for outside talent and tools and handed bridging to skilled bridgers who built the partnerships for digital transformation.
- Catalyst. He mobilized global stakeholders as agents of financial inclusion, ending up leading a global ecosystem, not just a company. In June 2023 he became president of the World Bank, his largest platform yet.
Formal authority is a limited source of power in leading genius at scale; architect, bridger and catalyst are practices open to any leader, at any level or function. The rest of the book takes one role per part and shows many leaders who were middle managers or entrepreneurs, not CEOs.
The chapter says Banga stepped down in late 2020 and also in 2021; he handed over on 1 January 2021. Going from $27 billion to about $335 billion is closer to 12x than "tenfold" (tenfold matches the post-2010 rise only roughly). The account leans on testimony from loyal executives and credits culture for growth that also rode the secular shift to card and digital payments across the decade, and the 500-million inclusion count depends on how "included" is measured (accounts opened versus accounts used).
Banga's toolkit is portable: a purpose that redraws the market (the 85% in cash), a budget split that forces attention to the future (50/25/25 with three horizons), explicit rules that break bottlenecks (seven-day auto-approval), incentives that reward intelligent failure and project-killing, and a protected, separately funded bridger with a hard output target.
Collaboration at the Speed of Science: Michael Ku at Pfizer Global Clinical Supply
Part One opens with architects, leaders who know innovation cannot be mandated and so reshape the social environment until cocreation emerges. Michael Ku, a middle manager at Pfizer, spent nine years turning a siloed, polite, change-weary clinical supply unit into a community that could debate, decide and experiment with partners. It was not technology that explained the record-speed Covid-19 vaccine trial; it was the sense of community Ku had built that let his team collaborate, experiment and learn at light speed.
Part One: the architect, building community
The authors start Part One from one premise: innovation is above all a voluntary act, so trying to mandate the mindsets and behaviors of cocreation is futile. Architects instead shape the social environment of their teams so that cocreation can emerge organically.
- Culture. Architects build community around a shared purpose (which keeps people aligned and energized on a long, hard journey) and shared values and rules of engagement (which guide how people interact and solve problems for customers and stakeholders).
- Capabilities. They help people embrace diversity of thought and the conflicts a real marketplace of ideas brings; push them to act, rather than plan, their way to new solutions, learning from missteps and failures; and supply analog and digital tools that make cocreation more inclusive, disciplined and repeatable.
- Structural levers. Architects watch how structures, operating models and configurations of tools and talent affect willingness and ability to cocreate, and change them deliberately to remove barriers and add enablers.
- Personal style, the most important lever. Constant calibration of their own practice: when to lead bottom-up versus top-down, when to support versus confront, when to be patient versus demand urgency, and when to stress learning and development versus performance.
Why three century-old legacy firms
The three architect cases come from organizations each more than a century old and leading their industries, chosen precisely because their legacies make innovation hard:
- Pride in the past. Colleagues were proud of earlier achievements and reluctant to unlearn mindsets that had long worked.
- Not-invented-here. Teams were slow to adopt outside perspectives and new technologies.
- Regulation. All three sit in regulated industries whose quality and safety standards understandably make them risk averse.
One architect called the task "mission impossible," yet each built an innovative community. The three capabilities intertwine, but each chapter centers one: collaborate (Pfizer), experiment (P&G), learn (Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi).
The scene: 9 November 2020
Ku, vice president and head of Pfizer Global Clinical Supply (GCS), joined an early-morning video call with R&D leaders after a sleepless night. Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech had cocreated an mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, and first phase-three results were about to be read.
A vaccine normally takes up to ten years. In March 2020 CEO Albert Bourla committed up to $2 billion up front to an expedited program, Lightspeed, promising Pfizer would "go all in" without compromising quality or trial integrity. GCS, a small but critical unit, runs packaging, labeling, operations and logistics for hundreds of trials worldwide, and for the vaccine it worked hand in glove with Pfizer, BioNTech, governments and suppliers. John Ludwig, SVP of Pfizer Medicinal Sciences, saw there would not be enough vials to run the study with standard reserve doses, a problem only Ku's team could solve; he called it a "Wild West scenario" that still had to meet quality standards.
No mRNA vaccine had ever been approved, yet Pfizer had already begun making millions of doses. Then came the result: among more than 40,000 adult participants, efficacy exceeded 90%, and Pfizer and BioNTech could seek emergency-use authorization at once. On a second call Ku told his team they had produced an "avalanche of innovation." They traded stories of hurricanes, wildfires, border closures and lockdowns survived while moving vials under extreme temperature conditions. Not a single shipment was lost, and GCS had meanwhile run logistics for almost 400 other trials.
The chapter tells the ten-year backstory. Ku's mandate had been digital transformation, but what carried GCS through "living vial to vial" was its community and spirit of collaboration, which made it willing and able to experiment and learn with partners.
An outsider coming in
Ku was born in the Philippines and grew up in Canada. Working as a pharmacy technician, he loved putting on the white coat to help patients. He earned a BSc in toxicology with a computer-science minor, moved to the US for a second bachelor's in pharmacy and a doctor of pharmacy, and interned in pharmacy operations at a Boston hospital before entering biopharma, a path he describes as moving from touching patients one at a time to touching whole populations.
In 2011, at the biotech Genzyme, he got an unsolicited call from Pfizer. He had spent 13 years building Genzyme's global clinical supply organization, discovering a talent for complex operational problems and layered internal and external relationships, and had done an MBA while working full-time. Friends warned him off big pharma, but Pfizer's patient mission and scale drew him: GCS shipped more than 1 million packages of investigational medicines to 8,000 sites in 70+ countries a year, which he called the industry's "pinnacle position."
What he found
- Strong but stretched. One of the industry's best-performing clinical supply chains, yet overstretched, with technology "close to end-of-life."
- Merger fatigue. Three large mergers and acquisitions, aggressive outsourcing, head-count cuts, and consolidation from 14 operations facilities to one internal packaging and labeling site.
- Survivors in silos. His team were survivors of repeated changes and layoffs; innovation was the last thing on their minds, and collaboration meant "getting along and going with the flow," whereas Ku knew innovation needs diverse views and pushback.
- Outsider alarms. In a company that promoted from within, his outsider identity set off alarms.
Starting with the "why"
In his third week, Ku spoke at a packed ad hoc town hall in Groton, Connecticut, with global staff online, which he saw as his defining moment. His rule: purpose and the why come before the what and the how. He opened by saying he was all about the patient, recalling holding sick patients' hands and seeing how trial success depends on site staff storing, preparing and administering drugs correctly, with strict protocols and precise data, while the systems companies gave those providers were neither user-friendly nor agile.
His ambition was a "patients-first, physical and digital, end-to-end" supply chain owning the entire clinical patient experience. Keith Jackson, then a group lead in Clinical Supply Strategy and Management (CSSM), recalled that before Ku, the chain ended once product reached the hospital.
The chain ends only when the trial patient takes the right product, at the right dose, at the right time, at the right temperature, in the right location. Site providers are partners, and for them information is as important as product, so merging the two demanded much stronger technology and data capabilities.
He sensed skepticism: many colleagues had decades at Pfizer, had heard about digital transformation for years, had done fine with analog systems, and in a regulated setting saw change as not worth the risk. Ku, impatient by nature, knew culture comes first and takes time, so he deliberately moved slowly and kept the entire inherited leadership team (LT) and the extended leadership team (eLT).
He spent the rest of 2011 on a global listening tour, meeting every colleague and key internal and external partner face to face, which he considered irreplaceable for trust. In each conversation he stressed that the work was about "bringing hope to patients," shorthanded as "patients first," an ethos of integrated work for a holistic patient experience rather than a tagline. He asked everyone, vendors included, to define what patients first meant to them personally. A colleague noted he listened to everyone, at every level. He reminded them their medicines might be some patients' "last hope," so speed and efficacy mattered. The tour revealed the main barrier: siloed thinking.
Collaboration for innovation: embracing diversity of thought
The authors cite decades of research showing innovation is usually a group effort, arising from interactions among people with different viewpoints, experience or expertise. They quote Einstein describing innovation as recombination of existing ideas, a "new mix," or looking at old problems from a new angle. Many GCS colleagues had spent their whole careers, sometimes decades, in one function, so Ku's task was helping them "get comfortable being uncomfortable." He chose three areas.
1. Bringing the outside-in perspective
To help the LT "break frame," Ku added high-potential employees from GCS and people from Pfizer's upstream and downstream partners, and invited leaders from development operations, finance and procurement to monthly meetings depending on the agenda. The LT grew from 6 to 16. Members worried it was unwieldy and asked why they should share decision rights with subordinates and outsiders; Ku used the objections to explain his why: the best decisions for patients needed voices from inside and outside GCS. Business administrator Jeanne Quattromani said trust took a long time. Ku mandated monthly face-to-face LT meetings, never the norm before, and transparent, inclusive LT decisions gradually set the tone across GCS.
2. Bringing the patient perspective
Ku held that "all patients aren't created equal." In 2012 his first major structural change created Clinical Research Pharmacy (CRP), staffed by clinical research pharmacists, a talent pool new to Pfizer's supply chain, tasked with gathering and sharing what patients and health professionals experienced at sites. He underestimated the internal antibodies: colleagues shut CRP out of key conversations, fearing, as CRP leader Stephen Kay recalled, that they would be replaced by pharmacists.
Ku learned that architecting something new and getting people to embrace it are different jobs. Instead of arguing, he invited supply staff on CRP-led clinical site visits. Many saw for the first time how professionals struggled to decipher complex instructions for preparing investigational drugs. Seeing their own packages on hospital shelves made their role tangible, and CRP's value as advocates became self-evident. The LT then created Patients First Awards, open to nominations across functions and levels; an early winner was a packaging and labeling team that made stickers naming the end patient (for example a pediatric cardiology or geriatric oncology patient) as a reminder of whom each package would reach.
3. Bringing the global perspective
Architects invite rather than force, often by asking questions instead of making declarations. In an early eLT meeting Ku asked something no predecessor had: "Where are our patients?" Discussing the many countries served, the team renamed the unit "Global Clinical Supply."
A year in, the global mindset was still thin. GCS supplied sites in 70 countries but had teams only in the US, UK and Japan; nobody had visited many distant sites, yet people made big decisions about them without knowing local health-care contexts or regulation. Ku set up new teams in Asia and Latin America. The established LT resisted (best use of resources? unnecessary complexity?), but Ku insisted patients needed people on the ground who knew local practice and language and could form risk-reducing partnerships. He added:
- Online forums. Colleagues in different regions compared the similarities and differences of their local circumstances.
- Rotations. Direct reports and high potentials rotated across functions in stretch assignments.
- Delegated expansion. Laurent Dhervilly, a high-potential with technology expertise but little experience leading virtual or global teams, was handed the global build-out; Ku saw new digital tools as essential to an integrated global organization.
Collaboration is not consensus
Diversity raises the potential for conflict. A true marketplace of ideas requires divergent views to be voiced, tested and debated; innovation comes when groups combine the best of seemingly opposed options into integrative, "both/and" solutions rather than "either/or."
By 2013 GCS valued different viewpoints, but Ku still rarely saw open, robust debate. GCS, and Pfizer generally, had a "deeply polite and respectful culture": collegial, but meetings aimed at consensus rather than the best idea, and dissenters kept quiet so as not to be seen as "the problem." Two tools helped:
- Complexity scorecard. Red, yellow and green circles like a stoplight: red for high-complexity, highest-risk projects, green for low. It gave a neutral, shared language for challenging projects the polite culture would never have questioned, used in regular operational reviews (for example, why packaging and logistics were harder for one investigational medicine than another). At first almost nobody would rate a study red, so Ku kept repeating that "red isn't bad, red means pay attention."
- OWN IT and Straight Talk coins. Ku championed OWN IT, a Pfizer accountability initiative, and its Straight Talk coins: placing a coin on the table signaled that the speaker was about to raise a sensitive point or critique candidly and in a patient-focused way, not to assign blame.
Adapting leadership style: the architect's key lever
Purpose, talent, structure and process are all levers, but the authors call the leader's personal style perhaps the most powerful instrument of cultural change. The best architects stay aware of the experience they create, periodically asking how people experience them, and how people experience themselves in their presence. Ku learned this over time.
Ku's work on OWN IT caught senior leaders' attention, and they gave him a leadership coach and 360-degree feedback. Despite wanting to empower people, colleagues experienced him as "directive"; he admitted that once he gave his opinion, everyone went quiet. The coach showed him that when and how he spoke affected psychological safety and the quality of discussion, and suggested that as the most senior person he speak last. It did not come naturally; Delayn Haynes, then head of CSSM, said he did not hold back. But Ku found ways: sometimes he would stand up, take four steps back from the table and let the diverse team argue it out.
- Rhetoric. Colleagues heard his frequent "change" and "transformation" as dismissive of Pfizer's traditions, so he switched to "evolution," which a colleague pointed out respects past achievements and builds on them.
- Sharing the 360. Most leaders keep feedback private; Ku walked the LT through his results, said what he had heard, what he planned to do and that he needed their help, modeling the vulnerability and openness he wanted. LT members then bonded and worked more constructively, and people grew comfortable speaking up even to more senior colleagues.
The cultural transformation, Ku concluded, required his own personal transformation.
Improving collaboration with digital technology and data
By 2016 Ku felt GCS had learned to "walk together": a community with shared purpose, values and rules of engagement, including a common lexicon for conflict and risk. Now it had to "run together." Information still reached sites in big binders full of forms, and with Pfizer planning to scale its trial portfolio, GCS had to evolve legacy systems of record into agile, end-to-end "systems of engagement and insight."
The LT mapped an ambitious digital strategy using big data, machine learning and simulations for a seamless flow of products and information, knowing the transformation could only be as good as the people implementing it, in-house and at partner sites.
- Value story for every tool. Each investment came with an explanation of why and how it served the purpose, through storytelling and interactive demos showing how simpler drug preparation sped up data and got medicines to patients faster; colleagues built their own use cases.
- "Data-informed," not "data-driven." When people asked how to weigh data against experience, Ku changed his wording and personified data as "the guy sitting in the chair next to us" whom the team can question.
- Usability. Visualization tools and dashboards made data friendlier, and staff saw it aligning their daily work.
Expanding the sense of community
By 2016 others carried the patient flag. LT member Richard Hwang recalled that even when Ku said nothing, someone would ask whether an option was best for the patient; culture was the foundation for tough joint decisions. Purpose also opened new partnerships:
- The Pfizer Consumer Home. CRP teamed with Pfizer's consumer division to test trial packaging with focus groups in a simulated home in Richmond, Virginia. When parents had to dose a child while children ran around distracting them, Ku concluded that if parents could not administer the medicine there, the instructions were not clear enough.
- The HOPE mural. An eLT team-building exercise produced a 20-foot mural on "bringing hope to patients"; one panel, painted by a pediatric oncology patient, spelled HOPE. It became lapel pins worn in GCS offices worldwide, and the mural was later displayed at Pfizer's New York headquarters.
Democratizing innovation
Technology adoption was still slow because staff conflated innovation with invention: at Pfizer, scientists innovated and the supply chain executed, so teams focused on what they should do, not what they could do. Ku, a hockey fan, paraphrased Wayne Gretzky: go where the puck is going to be. He set out to make everyone an innovative problem-solver in their daily routines.
Ku used four tools to make innovation everyone's job:
- Inclusive definition. At a town hall: innovation is anything both new and useful, technological or not (a new inventory method, a cut inefficiency); the complexity scorecard itself counted.
- "Dare to Try." A Pfizer-wide mantra Ku invoked whenever the team hesitated over something unfamiliar.
- "Learnings." Missteps and intelligent failures were relabeled learnings.
- "Learn Fast" award. Added to the Patients First Awards, adapting startups' "fail fast" to a business focused on quality and safety.
Feeling safer, teams tested their own operations:
- Latin America. The team tested long-held process assumptions, found many unfounded, and cut one country's operational timeline from 55 days to 20. Its head, Viviane Arantes, had believed innovation meant digital and was impossible in her region; she began asking constantly what she could do differently.
- Country intelligence. Ted Bradley, head of Clinical Supply Logistics, overhauled a legacy system tracking regulations for 70 countries, uploading distribution plans and country specifications into one platform with a country architecture, so planners could enter requirements easily and see a full country intelligence picture.
- Data marketplace. Built with GCS digital teams to centralize data and coordinate innovation with more discipline: the "single source of truth" making the whole digital portfolio visible, and the center of excellence for data governance, cleaning and integration.
Building decision-making muscles
After nearly seven years, GCS was comfortable generating and implementing ideas. Inspired by Amazon, teams built mobile apps: the Kit Verify App for clinical sites and the Shipment Notification App, a first for any clinical supply chain.
Yet teams kept stalled projects alive, "walking zombies," that GCS could not afford with budgets tightening. An outside organization's survey found the root cause: weak decision-making driven by a long-standing discomfort with "creative conflict", so teams escalated tough calls to the senior team instead of resolving them.
Ku challenged the LT to work through the data, processes and structures and fix decision-making themselves. They struggled and kept asking him to weigh in; each time he refused and sent them back. In May 2019, after months of debate, they proposed "tetrads": cross-functional decision bodies drawing people from different line functions, a sharp break from single-leader accountability for each function. Kay called them "patient-focus boards." Haynes said the aim was to align ownership, create a contact point in each functional line and empower the next layer down, teaching them to analyze risk and think strategically. Members gained stretch exposure to other functions. After a slow start the tetrads drove innovation; one produced gene-therapy distribution ideas the LT would never have thought of.
Nearly ten years in, GCS had become the patients-first, physical and digital, end-to-end supply chain Ku had described in 2011, with a global footprint held together by digital tools. At the end of 2019 Ku expanded CRP to Manila, led by Fae Wooding, whom he mentored; through remote onboarding and cultural exchanges she built a global CRP team that used time differences to operate 24 hours a day, five days a week. Meanwhile Pfizer was divesting consumer and off-patent products to focus on innovative, patient-tailored medicines and vaccines, and Ku foresaw a "new clinical trial paradigm" of "velocity, speed with purpose."
Meeting the Covid challenge: collaboration at light speed
When Lightspeed began in March 2020, Pfizer made millions of doses at risk, ready to discard them all if safety and efficacy failed.
- No white space. With many staff at home, GCS adopted a remote, just-in-time operating model and decision cadence that removed the "white spaces" between steps; decisions were made and implemented immediately. Hwang said there was no buffer: everyone was ready to pivot rather than stick to a plan. A shipment could arrive at 6 a.m. and the patient be dosed at 8 a.m., never at the cost of scientific rigor.
- Data-guided vial moves. Trials needed sites with high infection rates, so GCS used one of Pfizer's most advanced data marketplaces to consolidate infection rates and site risks: extreme weather, lockdowns, border closures. Vials moved proactively, because doses idle at one site meant participants not enrolled at another, and faster enrollment meant faster data for regulators.
March 2020 Bourla commits up to $2 billion; Lightspeed launches and at-risk manufacturing starts.
9 Nov 2020 Phase-three results: over 90% efficacy among 40,000+ adults.
2 Dec 2020 First emergency-use authorization, in the UK, 266 days after the WHO declared a pandemic; the US follows shortly after.
2021 onward GCS runs trials for pediatric vaccines, boosters and an antiviral drug for severe Covid-19.
Ku, "up to his eyeballs" in complexity, was already looking ahead: his next architect's task was turning crisis ways of working into business as usual.
Lessons learned: architecting for collaboration
Ku was hired for digital transformation but found that tools and data would not magically make a legacy supply chain agile; he had to go back to basics and build the willingness and ability to collaborate.
- Middle-manager architect. Unlike Banga, Ku had little control over budget or pay. What he could shape was community: mindsets and behaviors.
- Invite, don't impose. Patients first was his passion, but he had people write their own stories of what it meant.
- Targeted changes. He listened, then changed structure, talent and digital tools to attack silos, fear of speaking up and weak decision-making.
- Patience and self-change. Naturally energetic and action-oriented, he respected what already worked and adapted himself to what the team was ready for, from speaking last to new vocabulary.
Collaboration means people embracing their differences and working through them together. The authors' wider finding is that too little conflict, not too much, is what usually impedes innovation. The reasons are human:
- Rejection hurts. Having ideas belittled makes it hard to stay in the fight.
- Loyalty mutes critique. It is hard to challenge a beloved colleague's pet project even when everyone thinks it should die.
- Contrarians get sidelined. Those who challenge the status quo too often are labeled disruptors and eventually ignored.
| Barrier Ku found | Lever he pulled | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Siloed, single-function careers | LT from 6 to 16, rotations, regional teams | Outside-in and global views |
| Supply chain blind to patients | CRP pharmacists, site visits, awards | Patients first becomes the norm |
| Polite consensus culture | Complexity scorecard, Straight Talk coins | Neutral language for dissent |
| Directive leader | Coaching, speaking last, sharing 360 | People speak up to seniors |
| Innovation seen as invention | New-and-useful definition, Learn Fast | 55-day process cut to 20 |
| Escalation, zombie projects | LT designs tetrads | Decisions pushed a layer down |
That is why architects must invest in community, the glue that holds groups together across the rocky social terrain of cocreation. GCS came to see itself as innovators putting patients first just in time for a pandemic, when, as the authors put it, everyone became the patient.
The chapter credits Einstein with a passage on innovation as "combinational chemistry"; he did speak of "combinatory play," but the recombination language reads like a modern paraphrase, likely misattributed. The Lightspeed outcome also rested on BioNTech's mRNA platform, massive funding and regulators' rolling reviews, so tying it to GCS culture is plausible but untested; the account comes largely from Ku and his own team.
Ku's playbook suits any middle manager without budget power: redefine where the process ends (at the patient, not the shipment), widen the room (high potentials, partners, new professions), make people see the end user in person, give a polite culture neutral language for dissent (stoplight ratings, signal coins), speak last, and when decisions stall, make the team design its own decision structure.
Experimenting into the Future: Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble
Kathy Fish, P&G's chief research, development and innovation officer from 2014, inherited a company whose celebrated stage-gate machine had stalled against nimble direct-to-consumer startups. Instead of decreeing change, she introduced lean innovation through GrowthWorks, itself run as an experiment co-owned by the business units, then fixed the incentives, talent gaps and leader habits that made failure feel like career suicide. Architecting experimentation, the authors conclude, meant asking generative questions rather than making choices for others, so teams could discover for themselves how to act their way into the future.
Fish's motto, the chapter's epigraph, was that P&G had to "innovate how we innovate."
A consumer superpower and its broken machine
Procter & Gamble, founded in 1837, sells products billions of people use weekly or daily and dominates US retail shelves: Tide alone took nearly 20% of US laundry detergent sales in 2022; Crest and Gillette crowd personal care, Cascade, Bounty and Swiffer home cleaning, Pampers and Luvs baby care.
Kathy Fish, a chemical engineering graduate of Michigan State, called her P&G interview a defining moment. In 1979 she moved to Cincinnati and built a four-decade career in R&D. Many credited P&G's growth to turning innovation into a science, or at least a predictable machine: its stage-gate method, which became the industry standard, split R&D, manufacturing, marketing and sales into discrete linear stages, with big investments and timelines of up to ten years from lab idea to shelf. Chief brand officer Marc Pritchard said it worked well when P&G "had the luxury of time."
Why the machine stopped
- The 2008 crisis. Amid volatile commodity prices and exchange rates, category growth fell to an all-time low. Fish said the flywheel stopped turning and people doubled down on activity and cost savings. Instead of category-changing breakthroughs, business units (BUs) produced incremental tweaks (a new color or flavor): more initiatives, but not innovations that solved real problems or opened new possibilities.
- Digital startups. By the early 2010s the internet and social media let startups break P&G's assumptions. Dollar Shave Club was beating Gillette not with better razors or retail dominance, but with personalized facial-care regimens (pre-scrub, razor, aftershave), YouTube marketing and a direct-to-consumer subscription.
- A shifted economy. P&G's edge had been technical superiority, scale, mass marketing and retail distribution. The economy was moving from products to experiences, digitization raised expectations of end-to-end personalization, and rivals like Dollar Shave Club, Harry's and Glossier used consumer data to innovate nimbly. P&G's size, age and complexity turned from assets into liabilities.
Investors blamed the innovation engine, and in 2014 nearly half the executive team was replaced. Fish became chief technology officer, soon retitled chief research, development and innovation officer, overseeing 7,000 R&D staff and the innovation portfolio across all category BUs. Corporate R&D would keep making long-term bets on "transformative platform technologies," and P&G was investing heavily in digital transformation, but Fish judged that "P&G's innovation machine was broken": BUs had to evolve their high-capital, slow stage-gate approach or be left behind.
The invitation to innovate
As one of the most senior leaders in a 100,000-person company, Fish could have issued a directive. Experience told her change at P&G had to be bottom-up and "organic." Its 65 brands served more than 5 billion consumers, and the category BU heads owned most product and talent decisions, were judged on clear and mostly short-term financial metrics, and naturally preferred proven methods. Colleagues described Fish as a "strategic master": introverted, soft-spoken, choosing words carefully, having real conversations, focused on direction, and someone who pushes hard but is fair.
Finding the why in P&G's own history
Her first task was a value proposition for change anchored in P&G's purpose, to "improve the lives of the world's consumers." A researcher at heart, she studied the history of P&G's billion-dollar products and found a consistent pattern: the mega-brands did not rest on one technical idea but on a confluence of functional performance, packaging, brand messaging and retail execution, offering high value to consumers and retailers and lifting whole categories. Crest, Tide and Cascade had raised expectations until consumers could not imagine alternatives. Mary Lynn Ferguson-McHugh, CEO of Family Care and P&G Ventures, said P&G at its best disrupted how jobs were done: people still mopped, but with Swiffer rather than an icky rag mop.
Fish named the shared quality "irresistible superiority": broader than technical excellence, it covers the whole consumer experience, holistically crafted to make an emotional connection through advertising, voice, packaging and product in use. Being functionally superior was no longer enough; P&G had to earn the right to be "bought again and again." In a company of overachievers the goal caught on fast, and Pritchard called it an "immutable law" of P&G's business. The hard part was building the multifunctional ways of working to deliver it.
Lean innovation: a new way to experiment
Fish and Pritchard agreed that every employee, not just R&D, had a role in speeding innovation; commercial staff too would have to develop and test ideas collaboratively. Fish and her C-suite colleagues aligned, as architects, on instilling the culture and capabilities to experiment and bring breakthrough consumer propositions to market cheaply and fast.
Studying startups and digital firms, Fish had a light-bulb moment: her aims matched lean innovation, a disciplined way of bringing products, services and business models to market quickly and inexpensively, using multifunctional teams running small marketplace experiments to keep innovation grounded in real consumer needs. Her C-suite peers were intrigued: instead of big up-front development spend, lean innovation uses micro-investments tied to 90-day milestones, avoiding waste on doomed initiatives, de-risking investment and building the mindsets of experimentation.
Why experimentation is messy
The authors stress that new ideas rarely arrive finished. Innovation is a lengthy, messy, recursive process of trial and error; even framing the right problem can take many iterations, dead ends are normal, and testing and pivoting continue through scaling. Leaders understandably want to set goals, plan, execute and monitor; but the architect's job is to help teams act, rather than plan, their way forward.
Planning (orchestra). Leaders set the score: goals, plans, execution, monitoring; efficient, predictable, built for scale.
Experimenting (jazz). The sheet music gives only guardrails; musicians improvise, listen and adapt to each other. Uncomfortable: fear of failure looms, efficiency and scale economies may suffer, and there is constant tension between delivering a solution and exploring more variations for longer. Hence Edison's line that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
Fish told the authors the challenge was cultural, not technological. Lean innovation required the courage to "fail fast": show unfinished work to consumers, collect feedback, pivot. An HR leader explained why that was hard: P&G hires type-A, top-of-class people who have never failed and do not understand failure.
Socializing the method
In July 2016 CEO David Taylor took the executive team and BU presidents to Silicon Valley for "innovation tourism." Fish invited lean-startup thinkers Eric Ries and Steve Blank to present and let leaders watch startups at work. She was pleased to find that the new P&G Ventures and Fabric Care were already working in lean ways, combining startup speed with P&G's market data and marketing and distribution power.
Afterward lean innovation "spread like wildfire." Because it draws on many functions, it fostered an entrepreneurial culture. Strategic operating leader Karen Hershenson said "entrepreneurial" was a more welcoming umbrella than "innovation," which many heard as technical; it freed people to see innovation as everyone's job.
Implementation was unclear, so at the end of 2016 Fish partnered with Bionic, a consultancy of successful entrepreneurs with a process and structure for running lean innovation in large corporations, to launch GrowthWorks. Fish and Pritchard co-led it. Pritchard argued the future of brand building is experiences, which needs teamwork; commercial and technical sides had not been connected, and modeling their partnership was an innovation in itself. With the CEO they agreed the principle "business unit-led, and corporately supported," and treated GrowthWorks' rollout as an experiment: start small, collect feedback, pivot together with the BUs.
GrowthWorks: implementing a new operating model
Respected leaders volunteered to join, and an 18-person multifunctional GrowthWorks team formed inside Fish's corporate R&D group. Chris Boeckerman, director of innovation capability, received a handwritten note from Fish on how important the job was. The team installed in each BU a growth operating system, a mini-entrepreneurial ecosystem with four roles.
- 1. Founders. A dedicated multifunctional team of two or three: one from design or brand (consumer insight and business model), one usually from R&D (technical and product design). They identify and test product and service ideas through fast, cheap experiments on consumer problems or opportunity spaces (for example resource scarcity caused by urbanization and climate change).
- 2. Executive sponsor. An influential BU leader of at least VP level who breaks down barriers with peers across functions and supplies permissions and resources; at key milestones helps teams decide whether to pass, persevere or pivot.
- 3. Growth board. The internal venture capitalists: a cross-functional group, usually from the BU leadership team, managing the BU's portfolio, assessing founders' learnings at set increments and releasing metered funding based on demonstrated potential.
- 4. Operating system. A small multifunctional BU team giving founders specialist support in operations, supply chain, logistics, finance, rewards and more.
Above the BUs, Fish and her C-suite peers formed the enterprise growth board, keeping the company portfolio "sufficiently robust" and sharing learnings across BUs. Fish noted that a portfolio was needed partly because some projects should die: low-odds projects linger and consume resources unless leaders deliberately kill them. The corporate GrowthWorks team acted as a centralized concierge (training, solving operational problems) and as Fish's eyes and ears, becoming the hub of institutional learning across otherwise siloed BUs.
Piloting GrowthWorks and reframing risk
Rather than a big-bang rollout, Fish let each BU decide how to run it, backed by central capability. In January 2017 the corporate team piloted the structure with three BUs to see how it should adapt. HR lead Erika Long said the pilots would "run water through the pipes" and reveal which cultural and organizational features of P&G made the work harder. Each BU set a grand challenge tied to irresistible superiority, in an area that could disrupt it or become an opportunity:
| Pilot BU | Grand challenge |
|---|---|
| Fabric Care | Clothes ready on demand |
| Hair Care | Scalp health for hair health |
| P&G Ventures | Foot health at every life stage |
Founders met regularly with their VP sponsor and quarterly with the BU and enterprise growth boards, which tracked how fast experiments moved through the portfolio. The pilots exposed two problems:
- A solutions-first mindset. John Brase, VP of Family Care, said P&G historically started from what it wanted to accomplish rather than the real, unmet consumer tension. The team adopted the slogan "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution," which Mark Glogowski of the innovation capability team called the framework for all their efforts.
- Fear of failure. Especially in brand management, where one manager said "disruptive innovation is where marketers go to die." Failure was seen as career suicide, and P&G's own talent metrics reinforced it: Bionic's Anne Berkowitch described a habit of tracking everything, from procurement to performance reviews, against check-the-box yes/no metrics, which made the new decision-making deeply uncomfortable.
Long observed that P&G hires entrepreneurial thinkers and then holds them back with its systems. With Fabric Care's HR manager, she used lean principles to prototype new career paths, including "E-track," an entrepreneurial track for founders.
E-track pay rested on three measures:
- Sales target. A revenue goal for the venture.
- Burn rate. How fast the team spends its metered funding.
- Entrepreneurial stewardship. A new metric counting learnings generated and how far projects moved through the funnel.
- Aim. Long wanted people to see that failure was accepted and learning rewarded.
Experimentation requires leaders to work on themselves
As the system rolled out across the rest of P&G, leaders' own mindsets and behaviors became the barrier.
- Dedicated teams. BU presidents were told to staff founder teams with their best talent to signal importance; some refused. Julie Setser, VP for corporate functions in R&D, innovation capability and P&G Ventures, called declaring a dedicated team the first and hardest decision. Fish and Pritchard offered to pay for Bionic's help, but only for BUs that committed a dedicated team. It worked, then a deeper issue surfaced.
- Tepid growth boards. Founders left the corporate team's "activation sessions" energized, then met lukewarm BU growth boards and fell into disillusionment. Boeckerman concluded that leaders and teams had to be trained together, or teams would stop doing the hard work.
Well-meaning board members did not know how to engage with nascent ideas and consumer feedback: they made too many statements and asked too few questions, and judged milestones on short-term investment and return rather than learnings. Brase explained why: Family Care was a $5 billion business with a highly developed model and set way of bringing innovation to market, and GrowthWorks was alien to it.
Fish hired coaches. In growth board meetings they had leaders count statements versus questions, and reminded them their job was not to supply answers but to ensure teams designed rigorous, relevant tests and reflected honestly on consumer data; when an idea was not resonating, leaders should help decide the next experiment, or whether to kill and pivot.
- What did you learn? Removes the pass/fail frame.
- How do you know? Tests the rigor of the evidence.
- What do you need to learn next? Keeps the experiment cycle moving.
- How can I help? Signals teams should arrive knowing what they need from the leader.
Fish believed everyone in the growth operating system, not just board members, shaped risk-taking, so the coaches also trained founders, sponsors and operating-system teams. Boeckerman stressed that all learned the method in a common language. Over time more people tested assumptions and questioned orthodoxies, and spaces of psychological safety spread.
The Garage: bringing new talent and tools inside
In 90 days, one founder team found an opportunity space, consumers hate running out of toilet paper and paper towels, and produced three disruptive solutions. One was the Forever Roll, an oversized toilet roll. The excitement over such a low-tech idea came from this: in the whole history of P&G's paper business, nobody had questioned the assumption that rolls must fit standard holders. After talking with busy suburban moms, the team planned starter kits of three Forever Rolls plus a stand-alone holder.
As prototypes reached validation (midscale tests with real consumers of product and business model), founders effectively had to build a whole business, and many hit the same gaps: legal compliance, card payments, publishing a website, buying media, small-scale manufacturing. Pritchard noted that inside the big performance machine you take all that for granted. Brase needed a grade-A e-commerce platform and did not even know how to hire a performance marketer.
Following GrowthWorks' "pull" philosophy, Fish and Pritchard jointly funded The Garage, a central bench inside GrowthWorks with skills in design, research, product supply, IT, commercial and media buying, plus digital skills new to P&G such as UX and UI design. BUs could source talent quickly without hiring friction, but on a "try it and then buy it" basis so they would not grow dependent. Through The Garage, Brase contracted a performance marketer skilled in pay-for-performance advertising (unlike P&G's mass marketing), then hired him full-time to continue the Forever Roll experiments; without The Garage, he said, Family Care would be in trouble. Pritchard's stated mission was to put The Garage out of business: borrow it to start, then build your own Garage in the BU.
Overcoming barriers to incubation
By early 2018 several projects had validated solutions and some, including the Forever Roll, entered incubation, the phase meant to maximize value while limiting the risk of rising investment.
Incubation needed new capabilities: an agile supply chain and operational infrastructure.
- The 5,000-unit gap. Long said P&G could make five units in a lab or 500,000 in a plant, but not 5,000; midrange supply was the problem. The Forever Roll's first prototypes were handmade, and Family Care's plants, like all BUs', ran highly capitalized equipment built to sell several hundred thousand cases a day.
- Brase's reframing. The supply chain had to shift, during the learning cycle, from huge, high-capital, low-cost and slow to fast, low-capital and high-variable-cost to support a direct-to-consumer business.
- The catch-22. BU presidents funded small experiments but balked at stairstep investments: projects needed significant capital to run the large experiments that would prove ROI, while finance would not release capital without rigorous financial metrics. Unless solved, GrowthWorks risked becoming a "hobby." Fish's question: how to make mid- and long-term investments under heavy short-term pressure.
Fish answered on three fronts:
- Value-creation hypotheses. Founders learned to frame and articulate them so they could talk to financial decision-makers.
- Ring-fenced incubation fund. A central pool to carry BUs through incubation.
- Scorecard accountability (most important). Though reluctant to mandate top-down, Fish insisted BU presidents be personally accountable, with mid- to long-term innovation metrics on their scorecards.
A new portfolio of projects
Within three years the corporate team had activated more than 800 leaders and teams, founders were progressing and The Garage was in high demand. At the end of 2019 the first full portfolio review found more than 100 projects, which Boeckerman said made it real.
GrowthWorks also taught P&G to innovate with a fraction of the money and time, and the lessons spread to the core. Brase contrasted the old way (multiple years, multiple millions) with small bets where a mistake costs a few hundred consumers in a business selling to a hundred million; learning speed and cost were night and day. Multifunctional founder teams, boards and operating systems pulled commercial and technical functions together; Pritchard described designing every aspect of the experience: product, package, communication, in-store, online, in-use, after-use.
- January 2019. P&G headlined CES for the first time, rare for a non-tech company, presenting a P&G Consumer Experience Show of skin, personal care, grooming and home care products, including smart toothbrushes.
- 800+ leaders and teams activated in three years; 100+ projects in the end-2019 review.
- EC30 (Enlightened Clean). Laundry, home and personal care cleaners using tear-open packets the user adds water to, replacing plastic bottles and cutting size, weight, cost and carbon footprint. Corporate R&D built the underlying technology over years; GrowthWorks supplied the mindset to launch it across BUs. It became P&G's first direct-to-consumer subscription brand.
- Irresistible superiority. By 2021, internal ratings put 75% of the portfolio at the standard, up from 30% at the start.
Leadership lessons from architecting P&G's transformation
For incumbents, innovation is the only reliable path to market leadership, yet they often fail at breakthroughs because of barriers like those Fish met. Her approach:
- Purpose from heritage. She created the why and urgency by building on P&G's own origins: irresistible superiority.
- Democratization. Innovation became everyone's responsibility, not R&D's, and she built an environment where BU leaders and founders would take the professional risks of a different way of working.
- Learning the craft. GrowthWorks gave principles, but P&G had to learn to collaborate across functions, design rigorous experiments, use new analytics, make micro-investments and pivot on feedback; BU leaders had to unlearn habits and lead with more inquiry and less advocacy.
- Humility at the top. For all her belief in lean innovation, she introduced it as an experiment, inviting BUs to share ownership and adapt it, so cocreation was modeled from the top.
- Removing friction. She watched the structures, incentives and leader behaviors that made risk uncomfortable and eased them as they arose: filling talent gaps, coaching, new tools and resources.
Over four years Fish began disrupting P&G from within, redefining innovation as a consumer-led, multifunctional team effort instead of technology-led R&D. Colleagues credited her collaborative spirit, adding she would never raise her hand to claim it. She retired at the end of 2020; the GrowthWorks name was later retired as iterative experimentation became everyday practice, while P&G kept adapting performance management and rewards. Her parting view: the best leaders can do is unleash their organizations to make a difference.
The 30% to 75% jump uses P&G's internal irresistible-superiority ratings, not an external measure, and the chapter gives no revenue figures for GrowthWorks products or says whether the Forever Roll and EC30 scaled commercially Gains in the period also coincided with P&G's broader pruning of roughly 100 brands from 2014 and a large productivity program, so culture is not the only cause. The account comes mainly from Fish and her allies.
For any large firm: run a new operating model as an experiment co-owned by the units; staff ventures with dedicated founders; fund in metered 90-day tranches; pay founders partly on learnings; train boards to ask what did you learn, how do you know, what next, how can I help; offer scarce skills on try-then-buy terms; and close the mid-scale gap with a ring-fenced fund plus long-term metrics on unit heads' scorecards.
Learning How to Learn: Drs. Tom Mihaljevic and Rakesh Suri at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
Transplanting Cleveland Clinic to Abu Dhabi meant hiring 5,000 people from 87 countries, forming them into teams and delivering Cleveland-quality care from day one, in a culture where medicine is a family affair. Surgeons Tom Mihaljevic and Rakesh Suri did not copy Ohio; they built a learning community with coaching, huddles, scorecards and democratized data. When Covid-19 struck, Suri resisted the surgeon's instinct to take charge and instead "hyper-empowered" caregivers, treating every decision as a working hypothesis.
The chapter's two epigraphs set the tone: Mihaljevic on unity, where collective success brings individual success, and Suri on leadership grounded in humility and relentless learning, openness to new ideas and constant challenge to one's own assumptions.
Mission impossible
Mihaljevic, a surgeon in Cleveland Clinic's thoracic and cardiovascular department, was eager the moment he heard of plans for an Abu Dhabi facility, though he knew it was considered "mission impossible": every international venture by a large US health organization had failed.
The location was not random. Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit system founded in 1921 and ranked among the world's best, drew patients globally, among them Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE's founding father, who traveled regularly to Ohio for care. After his death, his son Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan resolved to honor his wish for high-quality care in the UAE: safe, superior patient experiences backed by strong medical thought leadership.
1921 Cleveland Clinic founded in Ohio.
2006 Mubadala Investment Company partners with Cleveland Clinic; a rotating Cleveland management team runs an existing three-hospital complex staffed by local practitioners, and both sides are disappointed by this light-touch approach.
2011 New plan: build a hospital from scratch; Mihaljevic joins as chief of staff.
2015 After nearly a decade of planning and construction, Mihaljevic becomes CEO; Suri later arrives from Mayo Clinic as chief of staff.
2017 Mihaljevic returns to Ohio as enterprise president and CEO; Suri becomes CEO in Abu Dhabi.
Jan 2020 An infection-control manager flags the Wuhan virus at the morning huddle.
Late Feb 2020 First academic medical center with US roots to treat Covid-19 patients.
Mihaljevic stressed that both partners would have to learn by doing, committing to success with a clear sense that it would not be easy. Where the last two chapters covered architecting for collaboration and experimentation, this one centers on learning, individual and collective: building a team willing and able to let go of established assumptions and develop the contextual intelligence to serve an entirely new patient population. Together the two friends and friendly rivals, both pioneers of robotic cardiac surgery, scaled Cleveland Clinic's culture and capabilities 7,000 miles from its main campus in a few years, and the hospital became the first Cleveland Clinic site to face Covid-19.
Scaling across geography: a world-class hospital in Abu Dhabi
Mihaljevic had long been committed to expanding access to care. He studied medicine in his hometown of Zagreb, Croatia, trained in general and cardiovascular surgery at Harvard Medical School hospitals, and chose Cleveland Clinic for its "patients first" philosophy and collaborative, multispecialty team model.
In Abu Dhabi, Mihaljevic led a team of 50 and oversaw 20,000 construction workers building an iconic 4.2-million-square-foot facility, every detail designed for a superior patient experience. Gaurav Dixit, executive director of IT strategy and program management, said the aim was for patients to feel less like they were entering a hospital and more like a home, hotel or airline, to reduce anxiety. Features: entirely paperless; every light bulb and door with its own IP address; no visible wire in any patient room; and in every room an Interactive Patient Care System, one tablet for movies, ordering food and monitoring medical needs.
Recruiting Suri
Mihaljevic wanted Rakesh Suri to help "build the hospital up." Both had challenged the status quo, pushed cardiac surgery's frontier and launched robotic surgery programs at their institutions. It took three years to persuade him, but Suri saw the job as the culmination of a life spent preparing to expand access to world-class care. The pitch rested on reach: Cleveland's six-hour flight radius covered a little over 300 million people; Abu Dhabi's covered 3 billion, a chance, said Mihaljevic, to better humanity on a different scale. Suri felt the two were aligned on innovation, excellence and empathy.
Beyond importing top global talent, the long-term goal was to educate the next generation of Emirati practitioners and seed a sustainable local health industry. So the leaders could not copy and paste Ohio's best practices; they had to learn with and from Mubadala, the government and patients, and cocreate a model of care fitted to the context.
Building a team of innovative caregivers
The partnership split responsibilities three ways:
- Cleveland Clinic (managing partner). Responsible for talent, sourcing and patient care.
- Mubadala. Responsible for physical assets, financial support and oversight on behalf of the country.
- Shared. Financial stewardship, which they called a value-based care model.
Every staff member at any Cleveland Clinic campus is a "caregiver," whatever the role. The leaders hired only highly qualified, experienced practitioners worldwide and deliberately sought people who were "deeply resilient, self-aware, and able to manage ambiguity." Candidates faced several rigorous interview rounds in Abu Dhabi; future leaders were also interviewed in Ohio.
- Cohort onboarding. New hires were trained, as far as possible, with the cohort they would work with.
- Earning trust. Messages stressed that serving patients in the region was a privilege and that superior care was imperative.
- Pivot daily. All clinical and nonclinical staff were empowered to listen to patients and pivot to their needs every day, and the leaders modeled it by adapting their own practice.
- Leaders doing unusual tasks. For 24/7 excellence, all physicians, the CEO included, took on work senior caregivers usually skip, such as house calls.
What did not translate
Soon after opening, the hospital hit operational trouble because many Ohio processes did not transfer. Demand, supply and capacity forecasts ignored how Ramadan and other religious observances change patient behavior.
Most important, care in Abu Dhabi was a family affair. A caregiver described stronger collective energy: health care became social, and clinicians were effectively diagnosing and treating the family. The building anticipated this: instead of open, curtained ICU floors, ICU rooms included a bed for family members. But caregivers still had to learn that communicating with and building relationships with families was paramount. Chief academic officer Dr. Murat Tuzcu noted many had not trained in a tradition where relationship is part of the transaction with patients and community.
The authors note that experiential learning is nonlinear and iterative; decades of research show it is difficult, can be inefficient, and leads to false conclusions when people do not take time to reflect on and consolidate lessons. Mihaljevic and Suri, as social architects, set out to absorb the early months' insights, adapt to local expectations to earn trust, and instill in caregivers the mindsets and skills for continuous learning.
Harnessing a "unique flavor of diversity"
In 2017, as growing pains eased and operations ran smoothly, Mihaljevic went back to Ohio as president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic enterprise, and Suri became CEO in Abu Dhabi. Suri had built a strong bond with Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhairi, hospital board chairman and deputy group CEO of Mubadala, who liked to say each side could not do this without the other. His mandate was twofold: make the hospital the "most innovative hospital in the world" while executing a five-year financial sustainability plan.
With a growing portfolio, including an aggressive timetable to launch new research and education pillars, Suri and Mubadala installed a new executive team, diverse in culture (the US, UAE, Argentina, Turkey, Canada and others) and in expertise (surgeons, operations directors, digital experts). Ohio and Mubadala gave it wide autonomy to "lead locally" and move as boldly as possible.
With caregivers of more than 87 nationalities, Suri saw diversity as the hospital's greatest innovation asset, provided people embraced their differences and learned from one another. Yet although he had helped hire and onboard all 400 physicians, his listening tours revealed conflicting ideas of what putting patients first meant; one doctor said people struggled to drop the attitude of "this is how we do it in Egypt" or "in Italy."
Even the crash cart, the equipment and drugs used to resuscitate a patient, triggered heated debate. Chief nursing officer Sue Behrens urged her team to reframe disagreements as chances to learn each other's best practices. After much back and forth, they reassessed the North American standard, folded in practices from colleagues trained elsewhere, and produced a version suited to Abu Dhabi. Suri was deeply encouraged and imagined what incremental and breakthrough innovation might follow if that learning orientation scaled across the hospital. He insisted he and his team model and reward humility, curiosity and candor.
The executive team learns to learn
Early executive meetings had little back-and-forth, and people often withheld opinions. Suri read the lack of candor as a sign his own team did not feel safe speaking up, and reminded them that harnessing complementary skills required openness and vulnerability.
- Biweekly group coaching. Despite much skepticism, Suri made every team member, himself included, attend group coaching every two weeks. Used to being the expert as a surgeon, he wanted help asking generative questions and challenging assumptions. The coach once held him accountable in front of his team, which he called the most revealing session.
- Admitting ignorance. Suri learned to acknowledge what he did not know and adapted his style to invite pushback. Erika Maltese, then manager of executive administration, said that seeing him sit back, admit he did not know and ask his direct reports to teach him made her comfortable asking questions in a room of executives.
- No silent thought bubbles. The team learned never to let unspoken "silent thought bubbles" persist, came to see one another as trusted sparring partners, and called the weekly meeting their "sacred space."
Cascading a learning mindset and instilling accountability
Execution happened across "hundreds of milieus," and Suri insisted every decision be teamwork, not a call from a central locus of control. Executives had to temper their "doer" instincts, not taking the stage but setting it for others. Tuzcu noted that the best doctors are not necessarily good leaders: leadership needs the skill of delegating authority and responsibility, which took real effort for people from hierarchical traditions. Setting the stage meant a clear, compelling purpose and vision plus the values and behaviors to fulfill them; in Suri's phrase, "align the organizational guardrails, and let the culture emerge."
With autonomy came accountability: four priorities, a daily huddle and coached teams turned a hyper-diverse, transient workforce into a learning system.
- Four priorities, four KPI sets. With Mubadala and Ohio, KPIs for the four priorities Mihaljevic set: patients, caregivers, organization and community. They fed every caregiver's personal performance scorecard. Many, especially nurses, were new to KPIs; Behrens said they had to connect the dots so KPIs were understood for their meaning, not as mere targets.
- Tiered huddles (from Ohio). Every day at 7:30 a.m., 25 to 40 managers reviewed the past 24 hours and the next. Some first saw them as "shame and blame" sessions because bad news had to be shared too; with experience they became the heart of a speak-up culture: problems caught early, reported, and assigned action items with deadlines. Each department also ran cross-functional daily stand-ups.
- Organizational effectiveness (OE) team. Visa rules made the workforce transient (most nurses on 3 to 4-year contracts), so 15 certified emotional intelligence coaches listened for and resolved conflicts, ran facilitated "norming sessions" where teams wrote their own rules of engagement, and taught empathetic communication, hard work given different cultural norms of behavior.
Over time teams cocreated their own bonding rituals. Coach Bruce Perry was surprised when a team launched a daily 30-day plank challenge during the year's busiest period, a sign they felt safe enough to take a risk for the team without a complete solution. OE partner Kate Brentley said the hospital was a "scientist organization of diagnosing and fixing" that had to shift "from scientists to gardeners": sow seeds and tend the ones that sprout, creating a ripple effect of experiments that nudged the culture as the hospital grew.
Digital tools and data support learning and innovation
Suri and the executives invested heavily in digital technology and self-service business intelligence (BI). A distributed network of data stewards and analysts centralized hospital data and opened it to the whole caregiver community. IT and BI were unusually proactive:
- Awareness before release. Every new tool or feature was preceded by a campaign explaining what it would do and how it would help.
- Question-framing workshops. Caregivers learned to frame data questions and make data-informed care decisions.
- Usage-driven targeting. BI monitored usage to gauge data maturity; Tableau usage showed avid and reluctant users, and BI then ran hospital walkabouts and lunchroom presentations to upskill laggards. IT used usage metrics to make apps more user-friendly.
Frontline nurses who had never used data began running A/B experiments daily, and hundreds of ideas to improve patient experience emerged, such as better ways of communicating to ease frustration over wait times. Behrens called them the most engaged nurses she had worked with.
Physicians innovated too. Working with local regulators, the hospital won approval for robotically enabled surgeries not performed anywhere else in the world, and doctors including Suri worked with IT on ambient smart rooms, remote patient monitoring, digital physician interfaces and telemedicine. CIO Bryan Lord said the physicians pushed IT. Dixit stressed the human anchor: Suri told the strategy team that walking into a room he wanted to face the patient, not a keyboard and screen, so interfaces had to become seamless.
By end-2019 the learning environment had produced a tide of innovation: operations grew more efficient and the hospital was ahead of its financial sustainability targets, a notable win against Mubadala's ambitious timeline. But the executives saw duplication: too many caregivers innovated in silos without sharing. With colleagues they built an analog tool, a priority index, to channel experimentation toward the hospital's most critical challenges and opportunities.
Accelerated learning: leading through a fog
In January 2020, as the team finalized the next year's budget and strategy, a mid-level infection-control manager spoke up at the 7:30 huddle: rumors said a flu-like virus from Wuhan was spreading fast. Its severity was unclear, but the team began repositioning resources for a worst case and alerted Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's Department of Health and Cleveland Clinic Ohio. Suri recalled the faces on the video call: they were the sentinels raising the flag for the international organization. Mihaljevic said Abu Dhabi triggered Ohio's domestic response: supplies, readiness, capacity and training, plus daily calls with Ohio governor Mike DeWine.
Covid soon became a "rapidly approaching freight train." The two executive teams met by video twice a week under Mihaljevic's "One Cleveland Clinic" philosophy of sharing learning across the enterprise, but this time nobody had answers. Suri felt for the first time that he was "staring into a fog," and decided the hospital must act as the UAE's first responder; every move affected caregivers, the country and US colleagues. Al Muhairi stressed that there was no playbook; the rules had to be written on the way.
Surgeon. When you see blood, your finger goes down and stops the bleeding; you are trained to step in when everyone is scared.
CEO. Suri called that the worst thing a CEO can do, because it disempowers the team. His job was an environment where caregivers could be contemplative and creative rather than merely reactive problem-solvers.
A new operating model: the working hypothesis
Every caregiver was treated as a source of intelligence; all were told to tap formal and informal networks about the disease. Mihaljevic had long encouraged counterparts across the global system to form their own coalitions and cadences (for example monthly councils of chiefs of staff and chief nursing officers), which Suri called the "virtual superhighway" of knowledge sharing. Suri demanded everyone be as data-informed as possible: the hospital had been testing for variants since January, and its data scientists built a model of the disease's trajectory that reflected Abu Dhabi's demographics and cultural practices. The data showed the virus behaved differently in different environments and that the worst was still ahead, so the operating model had to change.
The rule: every decision was a "working hypothesis," unproven until feedback on its impact arrived, and everyone should be ready to pivot in lockstep as information changed.
A new decision-making framework
With global guidance on testing, protocols and protective equipment changing daily, existing structures could not handle the detail and speed needed. Adapting an emergency preparedness model from Ohio, the hospital created a Covid-19 task force, moving decisions closer to the front line.
- Unexpected membership. Not just the most senior people: 20 seasoned and early-career caregivers, picked partly for subject expertise, so the team would not be bound by legacy thinking on a new problem.
- Single channel. To learn "deliberately as a whole," all Covid communication ran through the task force, which had wide autonomy to vet ideas and change processes.
- Emergency powers. For the few decisions needing executive sign-off, it could leapfrog committees and go straight to the executive team.
Hyper-empowerment
In late February 2020 the hospital became the first academic medical center with US roots to treat Covid patients. It introduced physical distancing, expanded emergency care and built extra isolation capacity. Suri asked what would happen if it had to serve hundreds or thousands of patients.
Having spent two years empowering caregivers, leaders now had to "hyper-empower" them, strengthening teamwork, agility, compassion and resilience. Suri reasoned that leaders cannot know minute by minute what caregivers are doing, yet those minute-by-minute decisions save lives. So the team restated the four priorities, was fully transparent about the reasons for every decision and, above all, Suri did not hide his feelings: he told staff that leaders and the whole world were scared, but they were in it together.
Side by side with Mubadala they handled basics: cash flow and stocks of medicines, ventilators, protective equipment and ICU beds. Mubadala also helped coordinate across Abu Dhabi's health ecosystem. Suri rejected the instinct to prepare within one's own four walls: no scenario existed where one hospital thrived while another suffered. Mihaljevic credited years of trust and close personal relationships with Mubadala for the way the hospital, its peers and the government worked in concert toward a system that worked for everyone.
Managing the emotional strain of continuous learning
Covid was cognitively and emotionally exhausting, and overstressed caregivers cannot be action learners. With Mubadala, the executives added on-site sleeping areas and meditation rooms, nutritious food, online workouts, stress-reduction tools and grief counseling for caregivers and families. Leaders modeled self-care: Suri said managing yourself is part of crisis leadership, and muscling through, exhaustion and a worn-down immune system would count as leadership failures.
Learning to lead remotely
By early March 2020 the new operating paradigm was in place. Then, while Suri was on an emergency trip to the US, the UAE imposed a 14-day quarantine on arrivals from the US. He was on the first plane to land under the rule, was sent to a quarantined part of the airport and ordered straight home. When he called Al Muhairi in disbelief, the chairman told him everyone would be watching and he should lead in a way others would want to follow. Suri complied to set an example.
Suri's worry was how to give his team air cover, resources and empowerment over a computer, and that colleagues were risking their lives on the front line while he sat safely at home. He sent reassurance to his team, frontline caregivers and all partners and stakeholders; one caregiver said staff felt his leadership every day as he texted and called to ask what was happening and how people felt. In the third week of March all meetings went 100% virtual. After years of group coaching, the team had to learn rigorous debate on screen; Suri, finding expressions and tone hard to read, even sought coaching on how his face and body language came across on video.
Each day the leadership team held strategic conversations and emotional check-ins; one executive noted people can change dramatically in crisis and fuses grew short. The team had a reset ritual: whenever things got tense they took a break, reconfigured, renewed their willingness to be wrong, raised their humility, compassion and forgiveness, and returned five minutes, half an hour or a day later when ready to listen, keeping the meeting a sacred space.
Running to the fire
Released in early April 2020, Suri walked the hospital thanking people, who had stepped up and collaborated more than he had seen in his whole career. Thanks to transparency, caregivers who learned of emerging problems volunteered: when the ICU had to manage inventory differently before a patient influx, a young doctor coordinated with ICU professionals nationwide to share resources. Suri called it a new style of leader stepping into a void.
Caregivers thanked the executives for their honesty and humility. Surgeons told to work from home volunteered for redeployment; one caregiver said they were running to the fire, not from it, anchored to patients first.
- 2 weeks to move 1,500 daily consultations to phone and video, with regulators and partners, freeing space for a larger critical care unit.
- Emergency department visits up from 200 to 1,000 a day.
- Inpatient capacity up from 364 to 424 beds, none of it in the strategy or business plan.
- Coordination with the Department of Health and the six other Mubadala network facilities; for the first time, "traditional competitors" across the Emirates pooled resources to route each patient to the right hospital and provider at the right time.
Later, Ohio colleagues volunteered to fly in during local surges. Because the Cleveland Clinic system shared a sense of community, there was no not-invented-here friction; Mihaljevic said togetherness, teamwork and commitment to safety, excellence and patient experience were identical in both places, the product of culture nurtured since the founding.
What it takes to architect organizations that learn together
Scaling world-class care from Ohio to Abu Dhabi required a special cadre of caregivers: top professionals able to cocreate in a new context, with new partners and patients, willing and able to learn and adapt. Learning organizations do this in good times; the authors ask how many can keep learning when change is emotionally overwhelming and minute by minute. Research suggests many fail, lacking the deep listening and responsiveness sudden upheaval demands.
| Lever | What Mihaljevic and Suri did |
|---|---|
| Talent | Hired for resilience, self-awareness, ambiguity tolerance; cohort onboarding |
| Leader behavior | Admitting ignorance, speaking candidly about fear, self-care |
| Coaching | Biweekly executive coaching; 15 OE coaches; norming sessions |
| Team routines | 7:30 huddle, departmental stand-ups, sacred-space meetings |
| Accountability | Four priorities with KPIs on every personal scorecard |
| Data | Self-service BI, targeted data literacy, nurse A/B tests, priority index |
| Crisis design | Working hypotheses, mixed-seniority task force, hyper-empowerment |
True to Cleveland Clinic's ethos, their leadership was not individual heroics but unleashing every caregiver's slice of genius. They built a learning community instead of copying US culture, deliberate about micro-behaviors, rhetoric and resources: adapting their style, introducing coaching, redesigning critical teams and democratizing technology and data. With persistence they cultivated curiosity, humility and candor, so caregivers questioned assumptions and debated diverse ideas.
In the pandemic the team stayed true to that ethos. Contrary to the belief that crises demand top-down rule, Suri and his colleagues delegated decisions, increased communication, admitted fears and mistakes and added resources for problem-solving, and Suri adapted his style to a virtual medium. Caregivers became proactive learners who cocreated with organizations beyond their walls. As at Pfizer and P&G, the authors conclude, without a foundation of shared purpose and values, it is hard to see how such a hyper-diverse organization could have scaled its collective genius under such high stakes.
The chapter calls Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed "now crown prince of Abu Dhabi"; he became UAE president in May 2022, well before publication. It describes Mubadala as the "venture capital arm" of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, when Mubadala is itself a sovereign investor. Mihaljevic was named Cleveland Clinic CEO in 2017 but took office on 1 January 2018. Outcome claims rest mainly on staff testimony, with no clinical-outcome or mortality data offered for the Covid response.
For any distributed or multicultural team: hire for ambiguity tolerance, not just expertise; give leaders group coaching that can call out the boss; install a daily cross-level huddle where bad news is mandatory; let teams write their own rules of engagement; measure usage to target data literacy; and in a crisis, label decisions working hypotheses, staff the task force across seniority, and say plainly that you are scared too.
Why Bridgers Matter: Nicole M. Jones at Delta Air Lines
Part Two turns to bridgers, the middle managers who make partnerships work day to day. Nicole Jones built The Hangar, Delta's first global innovation lab, as a cocreation engine rather than a startup accelerator, and delivered a biometric boarding pass prototype in 90 days across IT, CLEAR, legal, security, marketing and federal regulators. Contracts and governance are only the start; partnerships deliver when a bridger builds mutual trust, mutual influence and mutual commitment among people who think and work differently.
Part Two: The Bridger (building partnerships)
The authors open Part Two with a shift of scale. Technology now moves so fast and so broadly that leaders can no longer get what they need by driving innovation inside their own team or company. They must mobilize cocreation across organizational boundaries to reach the talent and tools their ambitions require, and that boundary work is the job of the bridger.
When firms set up outside partnerships, Hill and her coauthors observe, leaders pour their attention into governance: detailed legal terms on intellectual property, data sharing and decision authority. Those terms are necessary, but effective bridgers treat them as the first step, not the finished partnership.
As innovation moves to the edges of organizations, the people who must cocreate no longer share a team, a culture or a context. That diversity is the source of new opportunity, but it also creates distance, both literal and metaphorical, and with it a higher risk of conflict, mistrust and misalignment. Bridgers therefore take on hands-on, often emotionally demanding work: helping others accept their differences and work through them.
- Foundation: robust relationships. Partnerships across boundaries rest on mutual trust, mutual commitment and mutual influence.
- Curation. Identifying potential partners and engaging them.
- Translation. Building a common language and shared understanding across parties.
- Integration. Aligning everyone around shared intentions and coordinating the work across partners.
- Tools. Like architects, bridgers use both analog and digital tools to do this work.
Readers have already glimpsed bridging in Part One. Michael Ku at Pfizer cocreated "hand in glove" with partners inside and outside the company to get through the pandemic, and Rakesh Suri and his caregivers at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi coordinated tightly with government and even with local competitors.
The bridgers in Part Two are deliberately not the senior executives who sign partnership agreements. They are middle managers on the ground, charged with execution, who handle the daily dilemmas of innovating alongside people who think and work differently. They live in the messy spaces between organizations, building common ground or "social glue" among parties with divergent priorities, capabilities and constraints. Choosing middle managers shows the bridger's superpower most clearly: influence that exceeds formal authority.
Part One used legacy institutions as the stage for architects; Part Two uses innovation labs and accelerators. Companies increasingly create such separate units on the strength of research into "ambidextrous organizations," which recommends walling off innovative work in dedicated centers of excellence so the core business can run undisturbed. Leaders often tell the authors these units disappoint: they drift away from the rest of the company and chase "shiny objects," ideas that are never implemented, commercialized or scaled. The authors' diagnosis is a leadership gap. Wherever a lab or accelerator does deliver, they find a tenacious bridger behind it.
CES 2020: an airline on the keynote stage
Jones, a tech enthusiast, had attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas before, but never expected a part in the 2020 opening keynote. Her team was used to working quietly inside Delta Air Lines. CEO Ed Bastian opened by asking why an airline was keynoting CES at all, and answered that the gift of flight is the ultimate innovation because it connects people across vast distances.
Bastian then laid out Delta's vision. Beyond better in-flight journeys, Delta was investing billions to reinvent the airport: seamless, digitally enabled door-to-door travel from booking to final destination.
- No queues or paper. Security wait times and boarding passes would disappear.
- Parallel reality displays. A single screen would show thousands of people their own personalized information at once.
- Digital travel concierge. The already popular Fly Delta app would proactively guide every step of the trip.
Bastian credited cocreation, combining Delta's strength and scale with innovative startups, and invited Jones on stage. She introduced The Hangar, Delta's first global innovation lab, which joined the airline's corporate capabilities with startups' newest technology to build real customer solutions. Most of its ideas, she stressed, came from Delta's own employees, the people who know customers and operations best; hence the lab's focus on "applied innovation."
The Hangar was born of necessity. When Bastian became CEO in 2016, competition was intense and Delta needed continuous innovation to keep pace. Jones was picked to build a dedicated team separate from the core business to amplify Delta's innovation culture, and she and the executives agreed that external partnerships would be essential. The Hangar thus became a bridger, linking almost every Delta division with research and educational institutions, startups and the venture ecosystem.
The chapter follows its first award-winning project, a biometric boarding pass. It sounds like a simple technical integration, but it required inputs from Delta's IT, operations and marketing, from the startup CLEAR, from the TSA and from Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Jones and her team got it over the line by stitching together the social fabric cocreation needs, and in doing so helped start a culture of continuous innovation in a company serving 600,000 customers every 15 minutes and fixated on operational milestones. Over time The Hangar became a launchpad for employee ideas shaped by end-user needs and aligned with the core business.
The making of a bridger
Jones grew up in Atlanta, Delta's home city, and earned a computer science degree and an MBA. She spent her early career implementing e-commerce technology at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Macy's, IBM and WarnerMedia, always focused on nurturing employee ideas that built the brand and long-term revenue.
Delta recruited her in 2012 to help build Delta Sky Media, a new business selling content and advertising for in-flight entertainment. She worked like an engineer, logically and tactically, but soon saw that relationships were how things got done at Delta, a company with a strong sense of purpose and family-like pride.
Over her first four years she rotated through digital content strategy, marketing optimization and retail strategy. Each rotation taught her a group's operating model, power dynamics and decision processes, and showed her that every function had its own language and worldview. Any Delta initiative needed senior sponsorship, yet she noticed that middle managers' and senior leaders' priorities often diverged, even inside one division. That understanding gave her an enterprise-wide view of Delta and its customers, a network across functions, senior support for her ideas and outsized results.
Opportunity knocks
In November 2015 Jones read on Delta's intranet that COO Gil West and VP of innovation Matt Muta had committed $5 million over several years to a 6,500-square-foot space in Atlanta's Tech Square, a hub of innovation centers, startups, venture capital and Georgia Tech academics (a long-standing Delta partner). Executives had tried before to work with local entrepreneurs and researchers but struggled to build and sustain those ties. The plan was Delta's first "global innovation center" to make such partnerships work, and they needed a leader.
Jones had mentored and invested in Atlanta startups for years and had many ideas about how they could speed up Delta's innovation; this was her first chance to make those partnerships real. Muta was struck by her follow-through. West valued her strategy, technology and marketing background but above all her people skills: her ability to become the intersection between a big company and students and professors. He described her as "a problem-solver, a facilitator" whom people loved working with.
She took charge in September 2016 of the center, soon named The Hangar, with a mandate to embed an innovation culture across Delta, autonomy over what it would do and how, and three months to prepare a pitch to the executive team. She saw herself as a builder who likes starting from a blank sheet.
Designing an innovation lab for cocreation
Jones spent those three months benchmarking corporate labs, accelerators and venturing models. She was surprised at how much money they absorbed and how little value many produced, and resolved that The Hangar would not become the team seen as chasing shiny objects and disconnected from the business. West agreed: start from the problems to solve, not from technology.
Corporate accelerator. Delta would invest in and learn from leading-edge startups. But nothing guaranteed their technology would help Delta's business, and it would do little to shift Delta's culture.
Innovation lab (chosen). Delta colleagues and external partners would test and develop solutions tied directly to the airline's needs. Harder in the short run, but the only route to changing mindsets.
Jones expected the lab route to be tougher at first. Many employees had lived through Delta's bankruptcy, and people at every level prized operational metrics and risk avoidance, since small errors could disrupt millions of passengers or worse. She still judged cocreation with the core essential to begin shifting mindsets.
At the end of 2016 Jones and Muta pitched the executive team.
- Mission. To "incubate and invent solutions that empower employees and delight customers."
- Orchestrate. Guide innovation strategy and partnerships.
- Explore. Rapidly develop and test ideas.
- Build. Deliver innovative technology.
- Design. Scale innovation across the company.
- Internal consultancy under IT. Any stakeholder could bring an operational, technological or service problem; the team would validate it and find external talent to cocreate solutions.
- MVPs only. The Hangar would build minimum viable products to validate and de-risk further investment; the core business would launch at scale, since it had the capabilities.
- Sponsorship rule. No project without formal sponsorship from a senior core-business leader, because an idea only gets integrated if the team where it lands is behind it from the start.
Building a team of bridgers
With leadership on board, Jones hired designers, strategists, ethnographers, high technologists and specialized engineers, creative and eclectic people rarely found in an airline. To earn trust from varied stakeholders, she looked for unusual cultural, professional and personal backgrounds, signals of flexible, creative minds. Her nonnegotiables were passion, self-motivation and the ability to leave "pride of authorship" at the door. Cocreation needed shared ownership: partners inside Delta, not The Hangar, would take credit and be the heroes.
- Willy Barnett (January 2017). Her first innovation strategist was a seasonal Delta gate agent who had just finished a PhD in marketing, consumer behavior and technology; she valued his tech know-how, big-picture thinking and care for the human experience.
- Carrie Moore. A former art teacher and design consultant, hired to build a design-thinking practice, a learn-by-doing, nonlinear, iterative method of testing hypotheses grounded in the user experience (the authors liken it to lean innovation at P&G).
- Georgia Tech interns. A continuous source of fresh perspective; Jones delegated design of the internship program to Barnett and Moore.
- Collective hiring. Every member, from designers to technologists, helped vet candidates, in keeping with her aim of a highly autonomous team.
Jones also had to help these different people exchange ideas across conflicting ways of thinking and working. Moore credited her diplomacy and fairness: whatever their experience or degrees, everyone felt like equals, and Jones listened to and backed their ideas.
The Hangar's first ninety-day sprint
In late January 2017, in a barely furnished office, Jones got an urgent email from West: would The Hangar work with corporate security and CLEAR to develop a biometric boarding pass? Delta held an equity stake in CLEAR, a US company using fingerprint and iris scans for identity verification. The aim was to remove the waits and friction of showing a paper boarding pass at security and the gate.
West wanted a prototype testable in an airport within 90 days, to judge whether the technology merited more investment. The deadline was tight, but success would earn The Hangar credibility. Jones saw a win-win: Delta had no biometric capability of its own, so the pilot could ease the customer experience, teach Delta about biometrics and help it scale the CLEAR investment faster. It was also a chance to prototype The Hangar's own operating model.
She called Jason Hausner, managing director of passenger facilitation, and within days they held a kickoff with The Hangar's whole team, then five full-time staff and four Georgia Tech interns. They framed the project and mapped the sponsors and stakeholders they would need.
| Stakeholder | Role in the boarding pass |
|---|---|
| CLEAR | Biometric hardware and software |
| Delta IT | Anything technical; system integration |
| Legal | Customer data and privacy |
| Security, gov. affairs | Liaison with TSA and CBP for airport approvals |
| Marketing | Final sign-off before customers |
| Gate agents | Running the pilot (initially missed) |
Mutual trust, influence and commitment
Jones knew a multistakeholder project could stall if a single key person failed to play their part, so her rule for the team was to "always build relationships before you need them." That meant uncovering and empathizing with each partner's goals, capabilities and limits. Operators low in the hierarchy, for instance, would likely see the project as nonessential and investing in it as a personal risk. The team would have to keep reminding everyone why the work mattered, communicate often and openly about process and problems to earn trust, and share influence by ensuring everyone's input counted in decisions.
Given the number of actors, Jones split the work. She would bridge to senior leaders, who could then rally their teams, and she handed day-to-day project management to Barnett, two weeks into the job. His gate-agent years gave him credibility inside Delta, his tech fluency let him talk to CLEAR's engineers, and his user-experience expertise would keep stakeholders focused on improving customers' lives.
Building mutual trust
Delta IT sat in Atlanta and CLEAR in Philadelphia, so Barnett's first task was a communication channel to build trust and structure remote work. CLEAR's CIO met him at once; Delta IT was harder. The year before, a five-hour outage in Delta's Atlanta operations center had taken its systems offline and stranded millions of customers. A new CIO was hardening the infrastructure around systemic reliability, and IT was focused on reducing risk, not experimenting.
Jones lobbied senior leaders through her existing relationships. Barnett, who had learned at the gate that sometimes you must show up at people's desks, left Tech Square for the airport to win trust in person. Immersed in IT, he discovered that the formal chain of command misled: a VP might wait for a subject-matter expert below him to say yes or no, and that expert rightly held the real decision power.
Together they persuaded IT to formally assign two people. That did not guarantee buy-in: IT saw Hangar work as "special projects" competing with high-priority duties. So the team was careful about IT's time, selective about which meetings to involve them in, and kept those meetings efficient. One IT manager said she trusted The Hangar to bring her team in only at the right time, because they had business demands and no time to waste.
Establishing mutual influence
Barnett then convened Delta and CLEAR contacts to settle which biometric to use and who would own the data. The meetings became long debates, each stakeholder voicing its own group's priorities. At the time, facial recognition was faster but less accurate; fingerprints were slower but more precise. For CLEAR and for Delta's legal, security and privacy teams, keeping passengers' biometric data secure was nonnegotiable.
Jones coached Barnett often. Rather than dwell on technical detail, she urged him to recenter discussion on the shared intention: to advocate for the voice of the customer and start from the human experience. The team helped stakeholders picture the customer's journey together; a database architect admitted IT rarely asked how the product would look on an airport counter or how the customer would feel. Instilling this design-thinking mindset let every party see its own and others' contributions. One manager said they became active partners designing the solution, then worked backward to connect the systems, instead of treating it as a mere IT integration.
Maintaining mutual commitment
The parties settled on fingerprints for the prototype, with CLEAR retaining ownership of the data. The next debate was the back-end integration: identify a passenger by fingerprint faster than a paper pass. After weeks of discussion they agreed that Delta and CLEAR would each build an API to connect their systems.
CLEAR built its API in a week. Delta IT missed key milestones. With the deadline looming, Barnett chose to slow down instead of pushing harder, holding one-on-ones to understand the exact constraints. The obstacle was not skill but fear: IT was deeply reluctant to open internal systems to outside technology, and only then did Barnett grasp how much the outage had marked the team.
Jones kept senior leaders informed and stakeholders enthusiastic and aligned on the project's "North Star." West and Muta used their sponsorship power to clear bottlenecks and add urgency. After five weeks IT finished and validated its API, and marketing, government affairs and others joined to ready the pass for testing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Piloting the prototype
With launch near, the team realized it had left out a key player. Gate agents would run the pilot with customers but had never been trained on CLEAR's fingerprint readers. Barnett called the Agent Training Division, candidly owned the miss, and the division agreed to prepare 30 agents.
Days before one of the busiest US travel weekends, the pilot went live in Washington, DC: customers used fingerprints to enter the Delta Sky Club and to board at one test gate. Technically it worked, to the delight of The Hangar and CLEAR. But as expected, the qualitative feedback was mixed: agents and customers found the seven-second fingerprint read far too slow, and customers disliked touching a surface many others had touched. Greg Forbes of airport customer experience summed it up for the team: "Biometrics, yes. Fingerprint, no."
Jones was still thrilled: the team had delivered a prototype and new insights within 90 days. Because facial recognition was improving fast, senior leaders agreed to fund more R&D. Meanwhile Delta would roll out fingerprint entry to keep learning about biometrics and fix back-end problems. That raised the next question: where in the core business should biometrics live, with a team willing to fund further development and drive airport implementation?
Handing biometrics over to the core business
Jones had always believed that involving Delta partners at every step, from problem validation through prototype and pilot, would prepare them for the handoff. Despite some early reluctance, she and Barnett framed biometrics as part of IT's larger objectives. The project went to Cheoukee Leung, the Delta technology manager who was IT's counterpart to the Sky Clubs and had been part of the exploration. Leung noted that even though the project was Barnett's baby, he understood he could not keep holding it, and that one team driving it was better than several.
- Coalition ownership. Over four months, under Leung, a coalition from marketing, corporate security and operations took collective responsibility for developing and implementing biometrics.
- Rollout. By end-2017, fingerprint entry ran in every one of the 200+ Delta Sky Clubs worldwide.
- Promotion and next step. Leung was promoted to lead the airport customer experience IT portfolio and began working with Hausner's security team and CBP on facial recognition for international terminals.
- Template effect. Hausner said his teams reused everything worked out with The Hangar (meeting cadence, scheduling, problem attack, project management) as the template for other projects.
- Landmark. In 2018, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, the world's busiest airport by passengers nearly every year since 1998, Delta became the first airline with a fully biometric international terminal.
Nov 2015 West and Muta commit $5M to a Tech Square innovation center.
Sep 2016 Jones takes charge; three months to pitch.
End 2016 Mission, four work streams and sponsorship rule approved.
Jan 2017 Barnett hired; West requests a 90-day biometric prototype.
25 May 2017 Fingerprint pilot at Reagan National.
End 2017 Fingerprint entry in all 200+ Sky Clubs.
2018 First fully biometric international terminal, Atlanta.
Jan 2020 Bastian and Jones present The Hangar at CES.
Multiplying the bridger effect
The biometric project showed how much human effort a seemingly simple technical integration demands. Differences in goals, concerns and working styles appeared from day one; Jones and Barnett succeeded by building trust, influence and commitment.
Once word spread, employees across Delta brought ideas, but many were "jumping to solutions." Muta saw people arrive with a preconceived answer without understanding the problem. Jones worried The Hangar was becoming an extra resource for old wish lists, and insisted it must not become a place where people outsource innovation. So the team turned its biometric learnings into an operating model of tools and methods, aimed at leading explorations and also at helping core-business partners build their own innovation capability.
The initiative canvas: framing the problem
The team decided to source projects mainly from Delta's business units. They designed a detailed initiative canvas, an intake form that made stakeholders state the problem crisply and explain how solving it would improve the customer experience. The form opened a dialogue that taught colleagues to frame problems instead of jumping to solutions, aligned with corporate goals. Before any exploration, the team reviewed the canvas with internal and external stakeholders so all agreed on the problem and the success metrics for the MVP.
Earning senior sponsorship through storytelling
Every exploration needed a business sponsor, usually a VP, before it began; biometrics would have been impossible without West and Muta clearing resources and bottlenecks at the top. The team learned to "socialize ideas upward" through what one designer called strategic storytelling. Standard practice became a one-page fictional press release or mini-story with characters and a narrative. Moore found writing a story far more efficient than a huge design concept: it made ideas tangible, engaged leaders thoughtfully and set guardrails for imagination by stating what the concept was and was not.
Evangelizing design thinking
With a sponsor secured, the team ran a 4 to 12-week cross-functional design-thinking exercise, assigning responsibility for each MVP component and setting meeting cadences and rules of engagement.
- Ethnography first. Every exercise began with observation and interviews into the employee or consumer experience.
- User stories and personas. These captured different customer types and use cases.
- Empathy maps. These pictured the whole customer experience: what the customer thinks, sees, feels, hears, says and does.
Many colleagues were uncomfortable at first, and tensions surfaced inside The Hangar too: engineers wanted to jump to prototypes while designers pushed for the customer's voice; at other times designers dreamed big and engineers and strategists pulled them back to feasibility and strategy. Not every prototype worked, and that was acceptable. The team's mantra became "Failure is tuition," backed by standards and metrics for capturing learnings so insights carried forward even from failed experiments.
Stakeholder maps
Design thinking ended with a prototype concept worth building and testing. To untangle the airline's complexity, the team drew systems maps, similar to customer-journey maps, listing every stakeholder needed, showing interdependencies and revealing whether outside partners were required. The maps also covered unintended consequences, such as jobs that might be harmed. Barnett called this two-sided view a big lesson: empathize with those whose work will change, not only with the customer. Mapping ran continuously through each exploration so no one was inadvertently left out, a direct lesson from the forgotten gate agents.
Developing an innovation track record
- 30+ explorations completed.
- Delta consumer app, handed to the core and scaled.
- Wireless seatback entertainment now on every Delta aircraft, and sold to other airlines.
- Handheld devices that let gate agents move around while serving passengers.
- 80,000 employees in the company, which is why West pushed visibility.
In a company that size, wins were easy to miss, so West urged Jones to publicize them internally and externally. He described finding a communication cadence for staff, customers, investors and the board; once the organization saw proof points, momentum built, more capital followed and innovation "became real business."
As credibility grew, The Hangar was allowed into more exploratory work, such as the parallel reality displays shown at CES. Demand outran capacity, so requests were ranked by projected cost, time, revenue and impact on net promoter score. Jones promised help to everyone; where her team could not provide full consulting and project management, it connected requesters to startups, academics and vendors, and it hosted technology reviews to expose colleagues to trends.
Culture began to shift. Hausner said he had never worked with startups before The Hangar; now, when the lab could not engage, his team could manage innovation itself through the connections and technology awareness The Hangar had given them. He credited West's sponsorship but said it took the right leader to turn the COO's mandate into action.
Lessons: why bridgers must build mutual commitment, trust and influence
Innovation units are often launched as if a company could work smoothly with outside partners and absorb the solutions they build, with little thought for the social fabric partnerships need. Delta avoided that trap by finding in Jones a consummate bridger: enthusiastic, functionally broad, and gifted at relationships rooted in humility and emotional intelligence.
- Change culture, not only deliver. Every design choice aimed to release colleagues' "abundance of creative ideas" and embed the capability to realize them. An accelerator would have outsourced innovation; she chose the harder lab path that made colleagues integral and triggered their own capacity to innovate.
- Start from the partner's question. Her design began by asking why anyone would invest time and effort, on top of their core job, to work with The Hangar. Her answer: when partners share mutual commitment to a common goal, mutual trust and mutual influence over the joint work, knowing everyone is well intended, has no hidden agenda and has a voice.
- Become trusted first. Cocreation is time- and energy-intensive, so The Hangar had to be a trusted entity. She hired bridgers like Barnett and Moore, made the team's job setting the stage for partners to "look good," shared decision rights (hiring, partnership management) with her own team, and modeled diplomatic mediation between designers and engineers.
- Empathize at every level. Senior leaders and middle managers in one department had different immediate objectives and needed different engagement. IT operators avoided exploratory talk; Leung said her team stepped back when a project was full of "what ifs" and joined when the time was right. Real chains of command were messier than the org chart.
- Tailor the bridge. They repeated the shared intention to sustain commitment, communicated transparently so senior leaders were never surprised at the move from incubation to implementation, and met conflict with patience and curiosity, as when Barnett paused over the missed API milestone and enlisted leaders to ease IT's anxiety.
- Do we truly know our partners' priorities, capabilities and constraints?
- What emotional and material costs are we asking them to bear?
- Are we seeking both/and solutions wherever possible to meet different parties' desires and concerns?
- Are we generous in sharing recognition?
Above all, sharing credit and bringing internal stakeholders along gave them ownership of each innovation's continued success. The Hangar became a trusted intermediary, delivered a series of solutions, and helped colleagues across Delta learn to cocreate with external partners on their own.
The Hangar's lasting output was less the boarding pass than a core business able to cocreate with outsiders without The Hangar in the room. Requiring a senior sponsor, handing off at MVP stage and letting partners be the heroes were all ways of transferring ownership.
The chapter dates Delta's bankruptcy to 2007; Delta filed in September 2005 and emerged in April 2007. It also expands TSA as the "Transportation Security Agency"; it is the Transportation Security Administration. Neither changes the argument. The account draws almost entirely on interviews with Delta insiders and sponsors, so explorations that failed, cost overruns or friction with CLEAR are barely visible.
What Bridgers Do: Raja Al Mazrouei at the Dubai International Financial Centre
In late 2016 Raja Al Mazrouei, the DIFC's head of marketing, answered a request to brand a new accelerator by asking what fintech was. Within five years she had built The Fintech Hive into one of the Middle East's leading accelerators by getting incumbent banks, startups and regulators to cocreate. Her story spells out the bridger's three functions: curate the right partners, translate until they understand each other, and integrate them around a shared intention and shared ways of working.
The phone call
Late in 2016, Al Mazrouei, head of marketing and corporate communications at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), was signing off a major retail development when a colleague from the strategy team called. The DIFC was launching an accelerator; strategy would do the groundwork, but her team had to name it, brand it and make it happen. Her honest reply was a question: what is fintech?
Over the next five years she turned that vision into The Fintech Hive (The Hive). The authors list its record by 2022:
- Startups. More than 200 accelerated, which together raised over $500 million.
- Jobs and products. Over 100 jobs created and more than 100 fintech products launched across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
- Recognition. Named among Global Finance's "World's Best Innovation Labs" in 2021; Al Mazrouei herself became a recognized fintech thought leader.
She did this from inside a large government bureaucracy, starting with no knowledge of the field. Her edge, the authors argue, was bridging: building partnerships across incumbent financial institutions, high-tech startups and regulators so they could cocreate the future of Dubai's financial industry.
Learning the power of relationship building
Al Mazrouei grew up in what she calls a traditional Emirati household in Abu Dhabi, learning to respect tradition while embracing the new; her parents pushed her to develop herself and serve her country. At university she was among the first students in a new IT program, then the hardest and least popular course, and she describes choosing it as a personal transformation.
After an MBA she moved to Dubai in 2005 for an IT career, wanting to help make Dubai one of the world's most innovative cities, and joined the DIFC.
- December 1971. The UAE becomes an independent federal state, formed partly to safeguard and develop its resource wealth.
- 2004. The DIFC launches as leaders of the seven emirates seek to diversify beyond oil and gas.
- Legal status. A constitutional free zone run under British common law (not sharia law), with its own regulator.
- 2013. After recovering from the 2008 crisis, it contributes 12.1% of Dubai's GDP.
- 2016. It hosts 1,500+ companies, including 400+ financial services firms.
She quickly became known for a strong sense of national duty, often citing the ideals of Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and his belief in technology and innovation as the economy's future. Abdulla Qassem, COO of Emirates NBD Group, one of Dubai's biggest banks, remembered her from their first meeting as a servant leader focused on people connections.
Promotions came fast because she was a stickler for quality: nothing left her desk without detailed review.
- Head of IT (2010). Consolidating and optimizing back-end infrastructure.
- Head of operations (2013). Then a newly created post as SVP of marketing and corporate communications, her first customer-facing, creative job and one she admits was outside her comfort zone.
- Gate Avenue. Her big assignment: the DIFC's 110 acres of real estate and retail in central Dubai. Under a national vision to make Dubai a global economic hub by 2021, she had to turn a financial center into a "lifestyle destination" where expatriates would want to work, live and raise families.
Gate Avenue brought the widest set of stakeholders she had ever faced: DIFC colleagues, other government agencies, and local and global firms in retail, art, finance and entertainment. It taught her how much patience and diplomacy it takes to keep everyone satisfied.
As she weighed her next step, her mentor, DIFC governor Essa Kazim, urged her to take a semester-long executive education program. She came back more confident, declaring that nothing frightened her any longer. She stayed in marketing but felt freer, and began side ventures in entrepreneurship and investing inside and outside the DIFC.
Envisioning the future of fintech
The accelerator request arrived in 2016 as Gate Avenue neared completion. The strategy team was working with a global consulting firm on a program to draw fintech startups to Dubai; Al Mazrouei agreed to lead the branding and marketing for the launch and set about learning the sector through a series of information sessions.
- 1%. Share of global fintech investment since 2010 that reached the Middle East and North Africa.
- 86%. The region's unbanked population only a few years earlier, among the world's highest.
- 42%. Smartphones' share of broadband connections in 2016, showing the technology was arriving.
Dubai had most ingredients for a fintech ecosystem: favorable demographics, access to local and global markets, government and regulatory support, capital and a growing economy. It lacked two stakeholders: fintech startups and venture capitalists, which other governments were also courting. DIFC leaders hoped an "innovation hub," anchored by a government fintech accelerator, would attract them.
As the strategy came into focus, Al Mazrouei saw something more. The accelerator was as much about modernizing the DIFC's established financial institutions as attracting startups; it was a vehicle for cocreating the UAE's future financial industry. So her team persuaded leaders of both incumbent banks and startups to take part in the launch, alongside DIFC officials.
Turning vision into reality
The launch on 10 January 2017 drew the most press coverage the DIFC had ever received. Energized, Al Mazrouei took over all fintech communications and became fascinated by the field. Two months later DIFC leadership sought someone with technology expertise and marketing strength to run The Hive; she volunteered at once and by April 2017 was acting EVP.
Only then did she grasp the scale of the job. The Hive had 200 applications for its first program, yet existed only as a website: no team, no process, no program design, no office.
Building the team
Her first priority was a team able to forge partnerships among very different stakeholders. She hired four people from varied technology and marketing backgrounds, three of them Arab and from the Gulf, and all of them women. To colleagues' surprise she did not require fintech knowledge, seeking instead entrepreneurial minds that could move across functions while staying committed to The Hive's purpose of helping Dubai flourish through fintech.
She set clear expectations. The atmosphere was informal and fun (she ate with the team and followed them on Instagram and Snapchat), but she was firm on delivery: work had to be perfect or she would not approve it, and she said so openly. Marketing manager Fatima AlHarmoodi described the other side: Al Mazrouei never micromanaged, trusted the team to organize its time, and the team repaid that trust by learning what she wanted and delivering it.
Building the brand and the community
The team renovated a temporary DIFC office into a modern coworking space and built the website and social channels. Al Mazrouei insisted every message speak both to the traditional priorities of the DIFC and legacy institutions and to future-forward global founders. A financial executive praised the result as a responsible brand: more playful than the DIFC's but subtle, always tied back to the nation, "the voice of the local."
Promoting fintech through her DIFC networks produced good suggestions, so once the space was finished she launched "Breakfast Buzz," a weekly forum where any DIFC colleague could brainstorm over tea and coffee. It became very popular, helped by a colorful, relaxed space with open kitchens, beanbags and phone booths. She also tapped global networks of consultants, investors and entrepreneurs, learning that programs such as Y Combinator and Techstars drew startups in droves; to compete, the world needed to know Dubai was a place where startups could innovate.
Designing the model
After many conversations she defined each group's role, and with her team designed a business model meant to be beneficial to all parties.
| Party | What it brings | What it gets |
|---|---|---|
| Startups | New technologies, models, services | Mentoring, pilots, a route to a license; no fee, no equity |
| Sponsors (DIFC banks) | Mentorship, resources, a fee | Curated access to top-tier startups; learning |
| Regulators | Legal framework, rules education, licenses | First-hand learning about new tech |
| The Hive | Curation, translation, integration | Revenue from sponsors; a growing ecosystem |
Other accelerators charged startups fees or took equity; The Hive did neither, earning its revenue from sponsors. The hard part was recruitment: finding startups sponsors would want, sponsors startups would want and open-minded regulators, with little room for error, for a program that had no credibility yet.
Curating the key stakeholders
Years of doing business in the UAE had taught Al Mazrouei that trust and buy-in are earned face-to-face. Her team chose to immerse itself in each stakeholder group to learn its priorities, capabilities and constraints, speaking business with some, financial services and technology with others, and regulation with others again. Only that contextual intelligence would let such different parties innovate together.
Regulators
The team started with regulators, beginning with people Al Mazrouei already knew. They presented fintech emerging worldwide and debated together what could and could not be regulated, while she listened closely to concerns about data use, compliance and customer privacy. It became clear a new legal framework was needed for startups to experiment in the region.
By empathizing and earning trust, the team helped regulators find their own chance to innovate. Together they created the innovation testing license, a preliminary permission to test and validate products in the market before earning a full license.
- Regulatory sandbox. Startups could run small experiments with a limited set of real customers.
- Customer protection. If a product or service failed inside the sandbox, the transaction could be automatically reversed.
- Regulator learning. Regulators could trial provisional standards and learn from real customer experience before fixing a full regime.
Sponsors
Using her DIFC network, she approached banks one by one for C-suite meetings. The DIFC name opened doors, but fintech was low on executives' agendas. So she worked with outside experts on an annual fintech report, a proprietary review of global and regional trends and investment, to help executives quantify and visualize the opportunity.
In The Hive's first months she personally held 20+ meetings with potential sponsors around the report. In each she listened to priorities and concerns before speaking, then discussed only the trends that matched that firm's interests. As buy-in grew, executives invited The Hive to run priority workshops with their whole senior team to find their top three industry issues, fintech or not. That let her team stand in the executives' shoes before showing how startups could serve their goals and ease internal constraints. Each contract, she promised, would be customized to the firm's strategy and risk appetite.
These conversations revealed that many banks shared priorities (speeding digital transformation) and challenges (scarce digital expertise). Al Mazrouei saw a chance for them to act as partners in modernizing the sector and serving the nation. Assembling competitors was hard, but with the DIFC's convening power she brought executives together, and here her skills as a translator showed.
Al Mazrouei knew putting rivals in a room would not by itself produce useful talk, so her team choreographed each meeting. Using the annual report as the platform, she always opened with shared industry opportunities and challenges, including the UAE's competitiveness in the global economy; the first report became the baseline for judging the industry's collective performance each year. Only after common ground was set did sponsors share their individual goals, questions and requirements. Sandeep Chouhan, then acting CEO and COO of Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, credited her with the nerve to pioneer: she had 25 banks openly sharing their modernization strategies.
The first program signed four sponsors who shared the Sheikh's vision: Emirates NBD, Dubai Islamic Bank, HSBC and Visa. The team made sure the relationships went beyond the fee, building networks across all levels and functions of each sponsor. Al Mazrouei called relationship management the most important thing they did; they knew the teams by name.
Startups
What they learned about sponsors' risk appetites and interests shaped the startup strategy. The Hive would recruit Series A fintechs with a demonstrated product or proof of concept (PoC) in three areas:
- Insurtech. Fintech for insurance.
- Regtech. Technology for regulatory compliance.
- Islamic fintech. Products complying with sharia financial law.
For months Al Mazrouei met founders around the world, urging them to apply and selling the promise of Dubai. To earn their trust she made another unusual choice: besides paying no fee, startups could join other accelerators too, where rivals demanded exclusivity. The purpose was to accelerate the market, so startups should feel safe; AlHarmoodi said whatever helped the startups made The Hive look good as well. Every touchpoint, from digital campaigns to application forms, was monitored for engagement and iterated often.
Mutual influence: sharing decision rights
From hundreds of applicants the team shortlisted firms to interview. Then Al Mazrouei did what bridgers do: she shared decision rights, giving sponsors and regulators a say in the final selection, although regulators did not vote to avoid conflicts of interest. She knew a group with such different views, most of them not technologists, would decide more slowly and with more difficulty. But a lasting ecosystem needed mutual influence and ownership from the start, and a process that embraced all voices and "both-and" rather than "either-or" answers.
After two weeks of interviews and debate, eleven companies joined the first cohort.
- Sarwa. An app letting consumers save, invest and trade stocks and ETFs in one place. Cofounder Jad Sayegh chose The Hive because it prioritized getting startups regulated: the testing license was their only chance, and they considered no other accelerator.
- norbloc. A know-your-customer (KYC) solution on distributed ledger technology, letting banks and governments share sensitive customer data securely; customers supply information once and it is shared across the network according to their preferences.
Selection was contentious at times and drew on all of her mediating skill, but in the end everyone agreed the cohort was a strong start.
Translating and integrating across startups and sponsors
Bootcamp Week and speed dating
The program opened with Bootcamp Week: meetings with banks and outside professionals such as law firms, compliance bodies and big tech companies. Seeing how intimidated founders were in corporate boardrooms, Al Mazrouei moved the meetings to The Hive's coworking space to level the power dynamics; sponsors and regulators needed a different setting to hear what was being said.
Regulators met startups every two weeks throughout the program to teach local and regional compliance. norbloc CEO Astyanax Kanakakis credited Al Mazrouei's effort in getting regulators engaged, noted that the regulators were learning too, and found them strongly pro-innovation in a collaborative atmosphere.
Next came "speed dating," each startup pitching to each sponsor. Despite rehearsals, many founders still could not make their value compelling to banks. Drawing on her knowledge of each bank's priorities and of regional business norms, she coached each startup one-on-one to tailor language and pitch. Knowing Emirates NBD had just launched a digital bank for millennials and wanted one for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), she told norbloc to show how its KYC could serve that goal.
Managing discrepancies
The team then matched each startup with one or more sponsors whose priorities and capabilities fit best, for three months of mentoring toward market readiness. Early enthusiasm ran high, but once partnerships became operational, tensions grew.
- No champion. norbloc, matched with several sponsors for KYC pilots, struggled to find a day-to-day contact; everyone praised the idea, then asked where a startup fitted. Kanakakis said they needed a champion inside the bank; Al Mazrouei worked hard to make connections and tend the "soft part" of the relationships.
- Turnover. Even with a champion, people in big institutions moved. When norbloc lost a valued partner it had to rebuild from scratch; one CEO recalled that she instilled urgency and introduced teams to new leaders across the sponsor.
- Speed mismatch. For founders time was money, and senior program manager Shereen Abdulla observed that banks' development and procurement cycles were far less agile than a young firm's.
- Attitudes and fears. Some startups arrived with an "I'm better than a bank" attitude; others feared conversations that went nowhere or that a bank would copy their solution.
- Recall the shared intention. Using her mix of tech and financial-services background to speak both languages, she reminded each side why it had joined and what it originally wanted from the program.
- Build empathy both ways. She explained to founders why banks' slow practices protect customers, and urged sponsors to see how frustrating their pace was for nimble startups and to move faster where they could.
- Advocate for whichever side needs it. She often found herself speaking for one party or the other.
- Turn directive when needed. Normally patient, she told sponsors bluntly how demanding they seemed and the risks they posed to founders, and told startups making unreasonable asks (such as PoC refinement costs) to take the sponsor's view and manage costs with discipline.
Demo day and the first results
On 12 November 2017 the first program closed with a large in-person event before startups, sponsors and regulators, where twelve startups presented their PoCs.
- Sarwa. Granted an innovation testing license to test with 10 clients and up to $50,000 of their assets, it onboarded clients, built and iterated a PoC and reached a market-ready product in two months, against the usual one to two years. It was the first of six cohort members to win a full operating license.
- Most found a home. Despite rough patches, bridging let most startups land with a sponsor; an Emirates NBD executive credited collaboration and her leadership in ensuring "tight coupling" of stakeholders.
- Sponsors take over. AlHarmoodi noted that sponsors now owned their startup relationships and could keep working together as long as both wished.
- Emirates NBD and norbloc. They formed a business partnership, and within two years used norbloc's KYC for SMEs licensed by the Dubai Economic Department, cutting account opening from 3 to 5 months to 15 minutes. Stories like this, Al Mazrouei said, began to build the ecosystem.
Curate, translate and integrate
Cocreating inside one organization is hard; across organizations it is harder. Jones and Al Mazrouei show how essential, and how demanding, the bridger's role is. Bridgers know the operational nitty-gritty of moving an idea to the finish line and the subtle social interactions along the way. In practice, the authors argue, partnerships depend less on formal contracts than on evolving social processes that leaders must support actively and continuously. Bridgers keep work on track, hit deadlines and turn ideas into reality by building mutual trust, influence and commitment among people over whom they usually have no formal authority.
- Curation: choose whom to engage and why. Not only which organizations but which individuals will invest time, resources and energy on their behalf. She surveyed partners through personal networks inside and outside the DIFC, opened with executives but engaged several management levels. It rests on trust earned through deep listening, curiosity and empathy, seeing where groups' priorities align and diverge (Emirates NBD executives and middle managers had different needs). It is continuous, since champions move on, and it includes persuading others to take part.
- Translation: build shared understanding. Amplify diversity and voice differences so partners can empathize. Bridgers defuse friction through more communication, so operational delays are not misread as bad intentions: she had founders ask why bank processes existed (to protect customers). When messages still failed she carried feedback herself, becoming the voice of the weaker partner to level power and secure mutual influence.
- Integration: build the common ground. The in-between space where partners bring their "slices of genius" together, filled first with a shared intention, a common priority serving each party's own (the annual report made banks care about collective industry performance), then with shared language, tools and processes: common definitions of technology and regulatory standards, forums for shared decision-making such as joint selection, conflicts handled by representing both sides rather than framing trade-offs, and shared rituals like the Breakfast Buzz, which became a meeting place for all stakeholders.
The Hive grows, and its leader moves on
Within a few years The Hive was changing Dubai's financial sector.
- 10th largest fintech hub in the world and 3rd largest Islamic fintech hub (2019 ranking).
- 31 finalist startups and 100+ mentorship pairings in the 2019 flagship program.
- 60 ecosystem partners (law firms, investors and others) offering pro bono clinics and advice.
- Partnerships with accelerators from Copenhagen to Tel Aviv; corporations and governments began asking for bespoke consulting.
More telling, the first sponsors stayed engaged and developed their own capacity to cocreate with startups, without her team. Spurred by that and by Covid-19, she moved The Hive to a light-touch virtual model of "innovation sprints." With sponsors running startup relationships themselves, the team could launch new programs and serve more, and later-stage, startups.
- Scale-Up. A platform-based program for post-Series A startups and VCs, family offices, private equity, investment banks, and corporate and government funds.
- AccelerateHer. A mentoring program, close to her heart, to increase the number of women in fintech in the region.
In autumn 2022 she accepted a new challenge and in January 2023 became CEO of Etihad Credit Insurance (ECI), the UAE's official export credit company. She plans to architect a digital-first organization supporting UAE trade and economic diversification, and is developing bridgers who can work across national and sector boundaries with businesses, lenders and investors, confident that innovation is in Dubai's DNA.
The chapter says eleven startups were selected for the first cohort but twelve presented at the closing event, without explaining the difference. Its claim that 200+ startups created only "over a hundred jobs" sits oddly beside $500 million raised. Rankings such as "10th-largest fintech hub" are cited without method or source. The account comes largely from Al Mazrouei, her team and her sponsors; the founders who failed to find a sponsor are not heard.
Bridging the Legacy and the New: Garry Lyons and Ken Moore at Mastercard Labs
Over a decade, two bridgers turned Mastercard Labs from an edgy outpost into the company's standard way of building products. Garry Lyons (2010 to 2018) primed the core, customers and investors to believe in digital; Ken Moore (from 2018) tied Labs tightly to the core business with shared goals, tools and processes, then widened it toward ecosystems. Bridgers are the organization's "social APIs": like technical APIs, they must be upgraded as the systems they connect evolve.
Recruiting the entrepreneur
Lyons is the founder met on the book's first pages: the tech entrepreneur who sold his startup Orbiscom to Mastercard in 2009 and was asked by CEO Ajay Banga to chart its digital future. Chapter 1 showed the company Banga inherited: risk-averse, consensus-driven and ill-equipped to use new technology, let alone create it. At Banga's urging the board had begun buying firms for their technology and, more importantly, for talent that understood innovation. CFO Martina Hund-Mejean remembered Lyons as someone who talked at a hundred miles an hour and thought faster still.
A serial entrepreneur, Lyons expected to leave within two years. He hesitated over Banga's offer because he had seen legacy firms mishandle innovation, and told Banga plainly that he was the wrong person to move next year's P&L or to stage "innovation theater." Banga replied that he wanted neither: Lyons should do innovation his own way, not corporate America's, and he gave him a budget and the autonomy to spend it.
Banga saw in Lyons a bridger as well as a visionary. Lyons valued Mastercard's incumbency, its scale, customer base and trusted brand, and could explain how new technology would become concrete opportunities for it. Chairman Richard Haythornthwaite said Lyons was trusted from the start because he had taken an idea to scale sensibly and could describe how, calling him one of the most commercially astute technologists he had met.
In 2010 Lyons became EVP of research and development. Employees then ranked innovation 26th of 27 factors for the company's future. His mandate, as he saw it, was to change how employees, customers and investors thought about technology by showing them "the art of the possible."
The chapter frames the two leaders' roles. Lyons "primed the core" and the market through Labs, a separate R&D arm that demonstrated possibilities and supplied methods for digital transformation. When Moore succeeded him, Mastercard was well on the way from payments company to what Moore called a "technology company in commerce," and his task was a tightly integrated process between Labs and the core product organization for repeatable execution.
Envisioning a digital future
When Lyons started, the iPhone was barely three years old, yet he imagined every connected device, from PCs to wearables, as a channel for commerce. Haythornthwaite recalled a company only just leaving the analog world while Lyons sketched what digital-first would look like. Many staff saw technology as a danger; a colleague said people expected the shift to electronic and digital to kill Mastercard rather than be its biggest opportunity.
One of Lyons's first moves was a high-energy YouTube video, "Mastercard by the Numbers." The tech press adored Facebook, he noted, but it had under a billion users.
- 1.9 billion cards on the network.
- 35 million merchants.
- 210 countries.
- 150 currencies.
- 99.999% network uptime, the reliability that underpinned market trust.
That infrastructure, brand and scale, Lyons argued, were a phenomenal starting point for the digital economy. Both men also saw incumbency's dangers. Banga called installed infrastructure the enemy of innovation, something that makes a company complacent and stuck. Innovating inside a big firm was hard because there was so much to lose; the brand and customer trust could not be damaged, but caution could not become an excuse either.
A ring-fenced lab in Dublin
Needing a safe place to experiment, Lyons launched Labs in Dublin, where he lived, ring-fenced from core product teams and aimed at disruptive, breakthrough solutions for the next phase of growth.
He hired a small group of engineers, technologists and user-experience specialists skilled in prototyping and agile development, far from Mastercard's usual bankers and consultants. An early investment in a firm doing electrocardiogram authentication led to a research stream on biometric wearable payments, years before the Apple Watch. Labs was also the first part of Mastercard to experiment with the cloud, digital identity and blockchain. Lyons made sure all of it met Mastercard's strict security and trust requirements; Banga, while pushing urgency and thoughtful risk-taking, insisted the company own any unintended consequences.
Blockchain especially attracted Lyons because of his Orbiscom work on virtual card numbers and tokenization. Running sensitive payment data on a public blockchain was too risky, so he hired specialist talent to build a private blockchain for experiments. Deborah Barta, later SVP of provenance and strategy, said such skills were rare then and the pitch to recruits was to treat Labs like a startup. Bringing the talent in-house let Mastercard learn early; the purpose did not yet need to be clear.
Priming the core business to embrace innovation
Labs was the short-term epicenter, but Lyons and Banga agreed it should be a "stepping stone" toward a company of independent innovators, the last of Mastercard's eight innovation principles. Lyons's motto was that every company either is a technology company or must become one, so everyone from junior staff to the board should understand technology. The obstacle: people were not thinking about where technology was heading and would not spend time on noncore activities.
- 1. Good ideas can come from anywhere.
- 2. Be open and diverse.
- 3. Fail smart.
- 4. Share everything.
- 5. Define success metrics early.
- 6. Dare to dream.
- 7. Timeliness trumps perfection.
- 8. Labs as a stepping stone. Labs should ultimately make itself unnecessary as the core learns to innovate.
Bridging senior leadership
Many executives and directors lacked a basic grasp of technology; Hund-Mejean said the company could not even spell digital. Lyons thought this urgent, because innovation fails when the top does not understand technology's impact and so never gives it real buy-in. His bridging method was to translate abstract technology into tangible prototypes people could see and touch, always framed by practical business use.
- Executive program sessions. In the annual leadership program he ran technology sessions on Labs' work and new vocabulary; Haythornthwaite said directors were desperate for that exposure to a new language.
- Visits and shared decisions. He brought the leadership team and board to Labs regularly and invited colleagues into strategic decisions about Labs, creating mutual commitment and influence.
- One-on-one coaching. Comfort with technology varied, so he met leaders individually to explain trends and venture-capital insights in their terms. Hund-Mejean noted he never alienated long-serving staff and used their experience to carry the best forward.
- No two-class system. Haythornthwaite credited Lyons and Banga with avoiding any "old world, new world" or first-class versus second-class citizen split, which made Labs a healthy springboard.
Bridging at the operating level
Lyons created an innovation management function inside Labs to do the same for junior and middle staff: convening and communicating with employees (curation), teaching the language of technology (translation) and building mutual influence and commitment (integration). His aim was not that everyone build new products but that they do their own jobs differently: apply technology, tell the story differently, keep looking for a better way, be inspired by colleagues.
- Competitions with real stakes. Direct exposure to senior management and big cash prizes drew attention. In one contest 62 employees got sponsorship and training to incubate an idea and pitch it to the whole company for $250,000; most employees voted, and Banga had one vote like everyone else.
- 48-hour sprints. Teams turned rough ideas into tangible prototypes shown to customers, learning prototyping by doing; people queued up to join.
- Hackathons and an online platform. Offsite hackathons, plus a site where anyone could submit proposals.
- Training at scale with HR. Ad hoc workshops on emerging technologies and methods were standardized companywide once HR saw them; together they hosted Innovation Weeks with global webcasts. President and CTO Edward McLaughlin compared innovation to ethics: it has to pervade the organization.
- Patents for all. Lyons worked with legal to make it easy for anyone to file a patent.
These efforts embedded new vocabulary, mindsets and skills such as agile thinking. Not everyone found risk-taking easy; one EVP admitted there were frictions. Lyons shut down some competitions because their ideas resembled what core teams produced anyway. A colleague concluded the events became less about the innovations and more about creating innovators.
Simplify: overcoming implementation one step at a time
After a year of experiments, Labs had many promising but unfinished prototypes, and Lyons showed them to Mastercard's largest customers and shareholders, to the discomfort of long-tenured colleagues. Frequent demonstrations, he believed, would shift outside expectations of Mastercard and so apply pressure to innovate from within. At a 2011 investor day his team displayed a payment-enabled vending machine and handed the 300 to 400 attendees smartphones to try virtual payments; seeing it, he said, made it make sense.
It was time for commercial talent. In 2012 he recruited Barta, then leading fraud-management product development, to develop an idea from a Labs contest. She called herself the first businessperson to join Labs, there to add commercial muscle and prove things could move faster without touching core systems.
Within six months Barta's team built Simplify Commerce, letting SMEs easily accept digital payments. It targeted a segment Mastercard did not serve and was the company's first cloud-built, API-first product. The plan was a handoff to emerging payments, then core products, but the transfer was anything but linear. Barta had hoped the body would accept the organ; instead the core asked who wanted it, what to do with it, and whether it was an acquisition. Skepticism ran high, and Labs' modern tools clashed with core infrastructure that, as Michael Miebach (then head of Middle East and Africa) put it, had grown up over fifty years. In the end Simplify's product, technology and marketing parts were split and handed to their homes, and Lyons sent Barta along to make sure the "tissue grafting" took.
This was exactly the trap Jones avoided at Delta: an innovation rejected because it strayed too far from the core. Barta's lesson was to take the organization with you on the journey, because innovation on an island earns no buy-in.
Measuring what mattered first
By 2013 Banga judged that Lyons had moved digital products forward and, more important to him, culture. The two had agreed early that measurement mattered. With revenue and profit not yet fair yardsticks, the innovation management team tracked engagement at every event: a core group applied to every contest and sprint, participation rose with the number of events, and staff now ranked innovation number 1 for Mastercard's future. Banga expanded Lyons's role to chief innovation officer, adding digital transformation and digital payments.
Deepening external partnerships
By 2014 smartphones and e-commerce were everywhere, and Mastercard had begun to change too. The authors credit Labs' early blockchain work with enabling the digital enablement service, a tokenization engine for secure digital transactions. The defining moment came when it was chosen to power Apple Pay and Android Pay. McLaughlin saw the breakthrough in Apple and Google judging Mastercard technology the best foundation for commerce on their platforms; the deal made billions of devices compatible with the network.
Yet many banks that distributed Mastercard's new products were not innovating at the same pace. The cause was the business-to-business-to-consumer model: revenue depended on consumer usage, but Mastercard did not deal with consumers directly, so it was stuck with its partners' capacity to deliver. Banks at Labs' demos had been asking for help with their own innovation. Lyons had refused to avoid distraction, then realized he was missing an opportunity.
Partnering with customers: Labs as a Service
In 2014 Lyons and Mastercard Advisors, the consulting arm, launched Labs as a Service, an immersive sprint at Labs' Dublin headquarters. Because Labs worked internally, it became an external product; packaging innovation was novel then. In five days customers cocreated:
- A working prototype ready for user testing.
- A go-to-market plan.
- A board-friendly video presentation.
The main buyers were senior leaders at legacy banks charged with digital transformation, people with tough board-level duties who needed a steady source of new thinking. One client bought 20 engagements in 18 months, which Lyons told the executive team mattered not for revenue but because it changed the conversation with that customer. Mastercard came to be seen as bringing more value than competitors in bids, and Haythornthwaite found customers opening meetings by praising their trip to Dublin.
Partnering with startups: Start Path
Lyons wanted closer ties with startups, especially fintechs that many incumbents saw as threats. Beyond ad hoc investments, Labs launched an accelerator, Start Path, to attract the best startups and turn some relationships into formal R&D partnerships. Mastercard offered data, mentorship and access to 80 million+ merchants in 210 countries and territories.
His own founder past made him alert to startups' fears, the same fears Al Mazrouei handled at The Hive. Big companies, he observed, arrive with legal teams, NDAs and fifty-page contracts, the startup assumes they want its IP, and a large firm can cripple a small one without meaning to.
- Two-page contract. Advocating for founders, he persuaded Mastercard's legal team to cut the Start Path agreement to two pages.
- His own story. He told entrepreneurs how he built Orbiscom and why he chose to partner with Mastercard.
- Ask, don't assume. Since each startup differed, he asked them directly to name the four things they wanted Mastercard to do.
Start Path grew, in Haythornthwaite's words, into a significant venturing operation that made Mastercard a magnet for the industry. Labs began brokering partnerships between Start Path firms and core product teams; Barta called them "professional dot connectors."
Working with outsiders required more open technology. Labs pushed new internal API policies and helped launch Mastercard Developers, APIs and tools letting others build on the network. Miebach said products came to be built API-first, more transparent and modular, so components could be plugged in elsewhere far more easily.
Bringing innovation closer to the core
Lyons kept involving colleagues in strategic decisions, and closeness to the startup world improved Mastercard's acquisition decisions.
Applied Predictive Technologies (2015). A business-analytics software firm for a new market. The board and leadership needed a series of tough conversations before agreeing.
Vocalink (February 2016). An automated payment-clearing firm proposed by Miebach, now chief product officer. An hour was booked; the board decided in five minutes and spent the other 55 on how to move fast enough. The board had absorbed thoughtful risk-taking.
At nearly $1 billion, Vocalink was Mastercard's largest acquisition to date, serving a strategy of giving consumers more ways to pay (account-to-account, digital currencies, cards). Its infrastructure widened the payment flows Mastercard could handle in the short term and let it modernize its core platforms at a less risky pace.
To support this re-platforming, Banga and the board restructured to align products, operations and technology, promoting Lyons and other innovation champions to lead. Haythornthwaite called it organic: the board thought hard about transferring capability through the movement of people. Lyons would now run Labs plus a new digital payments organization, bridging development and delivery of emerging digital payments. But he told Banga it would be his final chapter: he needed to scratch an entrepreneurial itch.
Passing the baton
By 2018 Lyons had stepped down as chief innovation officer to launch Shipyard Technology Ventures, a venture builder helping large corporations create scale-ready products, with Mastercard as anchor investor and Lyons still consulting. People thought Banga mad, he said, but he wanted more friends on the outside creating and innovating.
Before leaving, Lyons discussed Labs' future with the executives. Miebach summed up the brief: Labs must stay a source of innovation and a cultural driver, but ideas could not come only from Labs. Lyons chose a successor suited to tying Labs to the core: Ken Moore, EVP of Labs and self-styled "practical innovator."
- Citibank background. Moore founded Citibank's first innovation lab in 2009 and grew it into a global network. Innovating in a corporate bank when nobody cared, he says, moonshots alone would have killed him; he took a balanced, results-oriented approach.
- Tech Hubs. Joining in 2016, when Labs was seen as edgy, he helped Lyons extend Labs to sites worldwide and build Tech Hubs: sleek spaces, separate from main offices, where core engineers experimented with customers and Labs staff.
- Talent magnet. CHRO Ron Garrow said Mastercard became a place people chose over Facebook and Google; Haythornthwaite cited 500,000 CVs a year for 3,000 openings.
Moore believed Labs had been exactly right for its time, awakening imagination. Now that Mastercard saw itself as a technology company in commerce, Labs had to execute on tomorrow, not just inspire it.
Bringing Labs closer to the core
Mastercard was consolidating core products, digital payments, Labs and processing under Miebach as chief product officer. Moore reframed Labs as a de-risking service that executes and scales solutions for the core product organizations, with an operating model aligned to the core and more disciplined risk management.
- Portfolios. Vertical and horizontal innovation portfolios, defined with the products organization and mapped onto its goals, setting technology priorities and short, mid and long-term horizons; when the business needed near-term revenue, Labs shifted resources to short-yield projects.
- The funnel: entry. An idea entered only if an executive sponsor in the core product organization vouched for it.
- The funnel: handover. Labs led research, concept and prototyping; management shifted to the core for market testing and commercialization.
- The funnel: eight weeks. Prototypes had to be tested in market within eight weeks of entering, to create shared urgency.
- The funnel: grafting. If the receiving team lacked capacity, Labs grafted people across with the product to carry its tribal knowledge.
- DFV: desirability. How tangible is the customer pain point, and how many customers feel it?
- DFV: feasibility. Which routes exist (acquire, partner or build) and how practical is each?
- DFV: viability. Does the customer value proposition fit Mastercard's business model?
Moore wanted everyone to think holistically about an innovation and its implementation. People used "prototype" to mean technology only; he insisted on prototyping all three lenses. "DFV risk" entered Mastercard's vocabulary, and an executive noted the company learned that go-to-market mattered more than the idea.
By building shared goals, language and processes, Moore shortened the bridge until the core could absorb new ways of working, not only new products. In 2019, after years upgrading its technology stack, the products group adopted the funnel as its standard operating model, Mastercard Studio: anyone could submit an idea, and agile squads carried it from prototype to commercialization as Labs once had. Miebach said Labs had codified agile, lean-startup thinking into Mastercard's way of working; Studio soon moved dozens of Labs prototypes into the core each year.
| Lyons era (2010 to 2018) | Moore era (2018 onward) | |
|---|---|---|
| Job of Labs | Inspire; show the art of the possible | Execute; de-risk for the core |
| Position | Ring-fenced in Dublin | Aligned to products organization |
| Main tools | Contests, sprints, demos, LaaS, Start Path | Portfolios, funnel, DFV, Studio |
| Measures | Engagement, culture | Products transitioned, revenue |
From building partnerships to catalyzing ecosystems
By 2019 open banking, central bank digital currencies, cryptocurrencies and other new technologies were remaking payments. Linda Kirkpatrick, president for the Americas, summed it up: partner or die; no one could succeed in a vacuum. Moore felt his role widening from bridging to being a catalyst at ecosystem level, sparking multiparty cocreation at scale. Kirkpatrick described each party contributing a slice so that one plus one equals three. Jessica Turner, global head of open banking and API, said it required systemic thinking: how an innovation affects each party and what is in it for them.
- Labs as a Service at scale. Rolled out through several business units, including Data and Services, where it became one of the most sought-after offerings.
- Mastercard Engage. Seeing merchants, corporations and banks struggle against nimbler rivals, Moore added this brokering service to Start Path, matching startups with clients eager to move faster. Fintechs increasingly sought Mastercard as partner rather than target.
- R&D networks. Labs orchestrated broader partner networks including Microsoft, IBM and Verizon, one initiative aiming to bring 5G to the payments network.
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, Labs could innovate systematically with internal teams and digital-first partners such as Stripe, Square and PayPal. In Q1 2020 Mastercard processed more transactions through digital channels than plastic cards. By mid-2020 it made a major open-banking acquisition; Haythornthwaite said acquisitions had become a "one-meeting decision," impossible without the culture and board confidence Labs had built.
- January 2021. Miebach succeeds Banga as CEO; Moore becomes chief innovation officer.
- 430 Labs as a Service engagements with 230 clients across industries.
- Start Path named World's Best Corporate Accelerator.
- About 10 products a year transitioned into the core on average; 54 in development.
The team felt "Labs" no longer fitted and renamed it Mastercard Foundry. Moore explained the image: a foundry smelts metal, breaking down the old to create the new, with an assembly line of products coming out the other end. McLaughlin described Mastercard as having become an "engine for digitization," the commercial ingredient behind Amazon's e-commerce, Apple's digital media and Uber's mobility.
Lessons from a decade of bridging
Why do some labs and accelerators deliver when others do not? The authors' answer is leadership by bridgers, like Jones, Al Mazrouei, Lyons and Moore, who build quality relationships across boundaries and so connect present and future.
As technical APIs let different systems talk, bridgers are "social APIs" that create the connections people need to innovate across boundaries. The Lyons-to-Moore decade shows bridging is deeply contextual: curation, translation and integration must keep upgrading as partners' needs and capabilities change.
- Lyons (from 2010): inspire and prime. He spent much of his time preparing internal stakeholders to welcome outside ideas, tools and methods, translating technology into language colleagues cared about and building programs that created participation and ownership. Later he opened channels to customers and startups: Labs as a Service and Start Path.
- Moore: integrate and systematize. On that groundwork he introduced shared rhetoric, tools and processes, so Labs and core products worked "hand in glove," steadily turning concepts into commercial solutions. When the core absorbed Labs' operating model, cocreation with customers and partners became faster and better, just before the pandemic's surge in demand.
- The long view. Bridging took time, effort and respect for the legacy organization and its partners. Moore then recast his role again: the Foundry's purpose became driving innovation across the wider payments sector, an ecosystem of 100 million+ merchants and tens of thousands of banks.
The leaders who will shape such futures, an executive said, are those who can stitch partnerships and ecosystems together. The authors call them catalysts, the subject of Part Three.
The chapter credits early blockchain experiments with enabling the tokenization engine; tokenization grew from Orbiscom-style virtual card numbers and does not require blockchain. It says the engine was picked for Android Pay in 2014, but Android Pay launched in 2015. The unnamed mid-2020 open-banking deal was Finicity (announced June 2020, about $825 million). The narrative relies on Mastercard executives; Simplify Commerce's later fate is not reported.
Unleashing the Power of Movements: Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani at avatarin
Part Three introduces catalysts, leaders who launch movements that harness the genius of people far beyond their reach. Two junior ANA engineers, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, set out to give the 94% of humanity who never fly "an alternative mode of travel": avatar robots that transmit human senses over the internet. With no formal authority they turned an XPRIZE, a space consortium and field tests into a global avatar ecosystem. A catalyst does not impose a collective agenda but creates the conditions for one to emerge, and the best test is whether the movement continues without them.
Part Three: The Catalyst (building movements)
Some ambitions require mobilizing stakeholders across an industry, a sector, a nation or the globe. For genius at that scale, shaping culture in-house (the architect) or building partnerships outward (the bridger) is not enough. Audacious business and societal challenges need catalysts, leaders who drive innovation at the ecosystem level.
Catalysts start and nurture strategic movements that tap the genius of people several degrees removed from them. They activate innovation in stakeholders close by, who carry the energy onward and invite others in. They frame collective possibilities and encourage multiparty cocreation, yet they are "masters of letting go": they create conditions for collective agendas to emerge rather than imposing them. They share the learning and value created, and also the sense of progress and possibility that keeps a movement moving. The authors' test: is the movement sustained without them?
- Map. Like explorers, catalysts chart the ecosystem's social terrain and locate themselves in it, using and extending their networks. Their questions: What are the contours of the problem? Who are the key stakeholders? Where are they? What relationships and power dynamics shape their interactions? What blocks cocreation, and what helps it? Because their resources are small relative to their ambition, mapping focuses time and attention where impact is greatest.
- Seed. Catalysts place tangible interventions that invite participation: an idea, a technology, an introduction to a partner. Seeds make new possibilities visible, act as stepping stones to action and spark imagination. They are crafted so that stakeholders, by pursuing them, advance both their own local purpose and the collective ambition, and placed where mapping suggests cascades are likeliest.
- Cultivate. Seeding is not enough. Catalysts embed the technical and social support seeds need to take root, such as digital capability and the repair of dysfunctional relationships, so cocreation can emerge and last. Early fruit draws more participants; continued mapping lets catalysts read the movement's pulse, adapt their own behavior and find new accelerants.
The architects worked in legacy companies and the bridgers in separate innovation units; the catalysts' common stage is entrepreneurship. All are values-driven businesspeople, some running social enterprises, and each built a new team, company or nonprofit to drive the movement. They invested heavily in developing high-energy change agents who could activate others, and used digital technology to sustain these interactions at scale.
The grand challenge
In 2016 Fukabori and Kajitani, two young aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways (ANA), came across a puzzling statistic: in an era of globalization and connectivity, only 6% of the world's population flew commercially each year. The other 94% was a huge customer segment for a future ANA and, in their eyes, a "grand challenge" that could change billions of lives.
Working in Japan, the robotics capital of the world, they imagined ANA offering billions of underserved people "an alternative mode of travel": a new global infrastructure of general-purpose robots (avatars) carrying sight, sound, taste, touch and smell both ways over the internet. On a sharing-economy model like Uber's or Airbnb's, anyone could rent and remotely inhabit a robot for tasks far away: defusing a bomb, performing surgery, touring Barcelona's old town, cooking for elderly people at home. Kajitani said the only limit was imagination.
Their own imagination went further still: they first wanted real physical teleportation. Dozens of quantum physicists told them it was at least 150 years off. One reframed the problem: telephones, the internet and video calls had let people figuratively teleport for decades. So they decided to teleport human consciousness and skills rather than bodies, which to most people still sounded like science fiction.
Neither they nor all of ANA had the talent or technology for this. What an airline did have was systems thinking and complex logistics: assembling tasks from many organizations into one safe, high-quality experience no single firm could deliver. Avatar mobility would likewise need many stakeholders innovating together across haptic sensors, AI, robotics, cloud and telecommunications, capabilities scattered across startups, corporations and universities, and some not yet invented.
Led by purpose, not position
Both men are of Japanese descent but grew up on opposite sides of the Pacific, Fukabori in Tokyo and Kajitani in Seattle. Both attended Montessori schools, which encouraged them to act on curiosity and entrepreneurial impulses.
- Fukabori. Ran recycling drives for milk cartons and chopsticks in grade school and, as a teenager, built an online platform linking NGOs with social entrepreneurs. He joined ANA for its entrepreneurial history: in three decades after World War II it grew from a two-helicopter startup into a major international airline.
- Kajitani. Founded his own startup early on, then took his first engineering job at Boeing.
Fukabori enjoyed engineering but spent his evenings on Blue Wing, a program to subsidize airfares for social entrepreneurs and nonprofits. He pitched it for years to anyone who would listen, without winning leadership support. In Kajitani, whom he met in 2010 on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner project, he found a sympathetic listener; they bonded over space and "life's bigger purpose," sharing a drive to launch programs for global action.
In spring 2011 a magnitude 9.1 earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing almost 20,000 people. Fukabori noticed Japanese companies showing renewed interest in social causes and wondered whether executives might now hear Blue Wing. He studied the tactics of social movement organizers and decided to target believers at any level of the hierarchy: a coalition of the willing whose groundswell might persuade executives.
Through an after-hours, employee-led innovation program, Fukabori recruited 26 volunteers, Kajitani first. The pair went to headquarters and knocked on marketing leaders' doors, though a rift separated HQ from the airport staff; even their ID lanyards differed, and HQ assumed they knew nothing of marketing. Their persistence reached Shinya Katanozaka, then senior EVP of marketing and sales. Rather than lead with social impact, they pitched Blue Wing as a way to grow ANA's global brand awareness, with a team already in place and only startup capital needed for a proof of concept. Katanozaka, hunting for entrepreneurs who could "break down walls," found the young operations engineer's passion refreshing and gave them a modest budget. After many evening sessions with volunteers, Blue Wing became a full marketing program, and both were promoted into corporate marketing, almost unheard of for ANA engineers: Fukabori to run Blue Wing in promotion and advertising, Kajitani to database marketing and AI forecasting. Their new desks were side by side.
From side gigs to moonshots
Having learned to find volunteers and resources in ANA's corporate maze, they turned to a crowdfunding platform to reinvigorate innovation in Japan. Over dinner in early 2016 they listed how the Japanese market discouraged startups and what ANA could offer: funding, sales channels and distribution. The next day they started putting themselves into executives' calendars to pitch WonderFLY. Yoshiaki Tsuda, head of corporate strategy, was startled to find two young employees had booked a slot in his Google Calendar, and backed them for their passion rather than the business model.
Soon after, Tsuda and Katanozaka (now CEO) told them ANA was creating an innovation department, the Digital Design Lab. Both asked to move there for crowdfunding; Kajitani was transferred, Fukabori was refused.
Fukabori kept looking for impact. At an ANA marketing event he learned the US nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation was holding its first summit where companies would compete for the right to choose and sponsor the next moonshot prize. He wanted in at once and brought Kajitani along.
It was a hard sell: three months off their day jobs plus a six-figure entry fee, in a company that asked staff to create new business, not to tackle global agendas. But they had learned to frame far-fetched ideas as short-term wins, and they had credibility with Katanozaka and Tsuda. To Tsuda and the deputy HR director they pitched XPRIZE as unmatched global brand-building (a win for marketing) and talent development (a justification for HR). Both agreed, and Kajitani blurted out that they would win. They still had to decide what to propose.
A winning idea
After three months consulting physicists, technologists and engineers worldwide with their XPRIZE advisers, they chose avatar robots that let humans teleport their five senses over the internet.
The ANA Avatar team presented avatars as "perfect mobility for 7.5 billion people." David Locke, XPRIZE executive director of prize operations, thought it brave for a conservative Japanese airline to propose a prize that could disrupt its business model and perhaps its industry. The audience disagreed: after the first vote ANA ranked last of nine teams. The pair kept their booth open until 3 a.m. every night, talking one-on-one with anyone who would listen and making the vision personal: surgeons operating on patients 10,000 miles away for health-care visitors, one robot linking a remote community to top universities for academics, unexplored sea and space reachable without disturbing local cultures for scientists. By the end they had converted the doubters, and ANA won the right to sponsor the next XPRIZE. There was no time to celebrate: WonderFLY went live the next day.
Tsuda, in the audience, had never imagined they might win. He caught a 1 a.m. flight to Tokyo and spent it preparing a pitch for ANA to fund a $22 million competition. Katanozaka's first thought on hearing the news was congratulations, his second that they now needed a budget. He sensed big potential, and as a child fascinated by time machines he related to teleportation.
A Japanese board funding a California tech contest was another matter, and Katanozaka made the pair pitch it themselves. He judged them 0.1 each as individuals but 10 together. The board knew and respected them, but they were two young men proposing a teleportation business: directors laughed, and some feared cannibalizing the airline. The pair argued that the summit win had already earned $9 million of US media coverage, nearly half the prize's cost, and that partnering with XPRIZE could revive ANA's identity as an innovator. They won again. Contract talks took months, but they began charting the avatar future at once.
Mapping the avatar terrain
Invitations flooded in after the summit, and they accepted every one to spread the word, digging into technical problems with academics and exploring partnerships with telerobotics startups. Each conversation clarified the state of the technology and where innovation was most needed, all on top of their day jobs.
At the end of 2017, as the XPRIZE contract was finalized, HR let Fukabori join Kajitani in the Digital Design Lab, and both worked on avatars full-time. Locke called working with them a dream come true: two very young change agents who had disrupted ANA's conservative culture.
Fukabori, impatient by nature, now felt sponsoring a prize was not enough. Competitions tend to produce "museum pieces" that never see daylight; a prize guarantees neither a market for the technology nor affordable components. They resolved to do more to make the prize improve billions of lives in a reasonable time, by catalyzing an "avatar movement" and building a runway for the XPRIZE technology to land.
- Demand. Raise public awareness and educate users on the technology and its use cases.
- Supply. Use that demand to draw corporate, university and investor R&D funding beyond the XPRIZE, scale production and cut component costs.
- Regulation. Work proactively with government on a framework that maximizes use cases and protects long-term viability.
- Platform. Build a digital platform to tie it together. To reach a billion people it must prioritize accessibility: any robot must interface with its software, hardware, cloud, telecom and machine-learning stack, and any user must connect whatever their bandwidth. The hardest problem: new internet infrastructure able to transmit, download and store more data than even Google handled, for real-time transfer of senses.
- Spin-out. The venture could not live forever inside ANA. They gave themselves until autumn 2022, the end of the XPRIZE, to launch the platform business, named avatarin.
Without yet using the word, they were starting to act as catalysts, persuading countless actors to play their part. That required a new business paradigm: avatarin would not be a gatekeeper optimizing its own value capture but would share value to sustain innovation. Kajitani called it arrogant for any organization to think only the people in front of it could solve a problem; the job was to network to the right people and make sure everyone benefited. So they would meet and work with anyone interested, whether technologist, researcher, local official or small business owner, embrace diverse motives, show each how to contribute and bring them along.
Seeding an avatar movement
As with Blue Wing and WonderFLY, they formalized the work as "ANA Avatar" and recruited 37 volunteers from across the company. They grasped a key part of the catalyst's job: giving people space to pursue their own priorities, since the limits of possibility were still undefined. Volunteers brainstormed use cases and approached organizations for field tests. ANA's brand opened doors, but many firms at first thought avatars were just teleconferencing. Outreach went beyond business, and to their surprise museums and aquariums were the keenest early experimenters.
Turning competitors into collaborators
The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was due to launch in March 2018, so top technologists had to be drawn in fast. Robotics R&D had mostly targeted autonomous, specialized robots (painting a car part, opening a door). This prize would gather hundreds of teams worldwide to build tele-operable, general-purpose avatars, a much harder problem.
XPRIZE teams normally treat each other as rivals, but Fukabori, Kajitani and Locke agreed teams would have to combine expertise to produce a viable general-purpose avatar. They designed "team pitch" events where startups in virtual reality, sensors and haptics could network and join forces organically. Sponsors rarely attend such events; the pair came regularly to motivate teams face-to-face and offer hope of a future market, sharing platform updates, newly found use cases and technology trends. Locke saw new ideas hatching across teams as never before at XPRIZE.
Making long-term goals tangible today
They believed big Japanese companies would eventually matter to the ecosystem for R&D money, mass robot manufacturing and long-term demand, but most refused to invest in noncore opportunities without quick payoff.
At a conference they met Naoko Sugita of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who had watched the same corporate risk-aversion stall Japan's commercial space industry for years. She had been asked to launch a public-private partnership for space technologies with near-term business uses, and called the avatar idea love at first sight. The pair explained that avatars could help JAXA and industry bridge long-term space bets and short-term Earth applications: a robot that works in space can work in radioactive zones, the deep sea and other dangerous places.
As XPRIZE had drawn startups, a JAXA partnership might draw Japanese corporations while helping the government's space agenda. In 2018, with Tsuda's backing, they convened the Avatar X Space Consortium with JAXA: representatives of 31+ leading Japanese companies brainstorming avatar business models on Earth and in space. By 2020 each firm would hold a personalized "road map to space", a tangible stepping stone it could choose to fund. Fukabori credited XPRIZE with teaching him to think humanity-scale big while using existing technology to prove the vision meaningful in the meantime.
Testing use cases to show the art of the possible
To inspire XPRIZE and Avatar X participants, they worked with government partners to field-test off-the-shelf robots, telling officials that no single company, consortium or even ecosystem could do this alone. The governor of Oita Prefecture on Kyushu responded: Oita's working-age population was shrinking faster than anywhere in Japan, threatening basic services, and officials saw AI and robotics as part of the answer.
- Who embraced it. Schoolchildren and the elderly took to the robots. Unlike many Western countries where robots read as threats, Japan sees them as part of its culture and accepts that societal problems need robots to help sustain society.
- "Wildly human." Watching people and robots interact, they recommitted to tools that "expand humanity" rather than replace people with autonomous machines. Kajitani said imagining old age tended by sterile white robots made them question the meaning of life; the missing element was the human factor.
- ALS waiters. In an Oita restaurant, avatars bused tables and earned wages while operated from home by bedbound ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) patients, giving them a new body and a way back into society.
- Fishing-pole avatar. Partners proposed uses the founders never imagined, such as remote fishing with haptic feedback of the fish pulling, the catch shipped by ANA to the user's door next day. Kajitani called it a new farm-to-table idea, spontaneous and user-generated.
As they understood the data and deep-learning infrastructure required, they became alert to legal and ethical consequences. Where does a Tokyo resident waiting tables in New York by avatar owe tax? How are bad actors found and removed? They joined ethics and technology forums, sought open dialogue with regulators in several regions and readily briefed governments on their AI models and personal data protection, aiming for a platform where each person is steward of their own data.
By end-2018, with press coverage mounting, Katanozaka and Tsuda persuaded the board to make ANA Avatar a stand-alone department. The pair became the first nonmanagerial staff in ANA's history to run a department, with a full budget and five full-time employees.
| Seed | Stakeholders reached | Framed as |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Wing pitch | Marketing chief | Global brand awareness |
| XPRIZE entry | Strategy, HR | Brand-building; talent development |
| Team pitches | XPRIZE startups | Combine skills; future market |
| Avatar X Consortium | JAXA, 31+ firms | Road map to space; near-term uses |
| Oita field tests | Local government | Answer to a shrinking workforce |
| Haptic-hand funding | Three startups | Solve the industry bottleneck |
Cultivating the avatar movement
Momentum had to be maintained deliberately. They began carrying passports at all times, ready to fly at a moment's notice to partners' robot tests; Kajitani said face-to-face contact built movement, energy and momentum and sustained long-distance relationships.
Even so, some partners lost commitment. The founders realized partners had to find their own drive; otherwise the ecosystem could grow only as fast as the two of them could, and they wanted it organic and constantly growing. When they said so, some partners simply went quiet, which they came to accept as "natural selection."
Keeping the consortium moving
The Avatar X Consortium needed more hands-on work than expected. Grouped by industry, companies were supposed to cocreate road maps, but many would not commit without a clear return on investment. The founders and JAXA ran weekly meetings and cultivated "tribal knowledge" across participants.
- Splitting rivals. When two competitors could not work together, they were put in separate working groups, each pursuing its own road map. There was no single vision for avatars in space, and the founders did not want others merely to follow theirs.
- Leading by example. To make firms bolder, the pair pledged to install an avatar on the International Space Station before the companies' 2020 road maps were due.
Investing in the industry's bottlenecks
Their activity gave them a bird's-eye view of avatar technology. Startups sought their strategic advice and shared challenges became visible. They saw a unique chance to accelerate the whole industry by finding breakthrough points and backing the best minds.
A pressing bottleneck was tele-operable hand technology, which gives an operator real-time haptic feedback from a remote robotic hand. In 2018 the pair offered three leading startups in haptic gloves, sensors and dexterous hands 10 million yen (about $100,000) of ANA money to collaborate, and let them organize the partnership themselves. A founder wary of corporates found them open about the route to a big-picture goal. Letting go was still hard for the investors; one entrepreneur told them bluntly it was a team effort, not theirs alone, and honest talks followed. The founders refocused on support: regular contact, introductions across their network, publicity and marketing. An engineer said freedom from restrictions produced unique solutions. Within two years the startups delivered a bimanual hand system prototype, unveiled at the 2019 Amazon Mars Conference, where a clip of Jeff Bezos using it went viral and lifted morale across the XPRIZE teams and the consortium.
By mid-2019 another bottleneck stood out: no low-cost robots, which delayed large-scale testing of the avatarin platform and capped adoption and demand. They feared building their own robot would cost startup partners' trust, but went ahead with newme, a simple, cheap "tablet on wheels." In one-on-one conversations they explained that their position inside ANA spared them the tight budgets and deadlines other robotics startups faced, and that the step served the whole industry.
The movement accelerates
In October 2019 the team unveiled newme at CEATEC (Japan's Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies). Katanozaka's keynote announced that the avatarin platform would go live in April 2020 with 1,000 newme robots at 100 businesses, ANA among them. Tens of thousands visited the booth, including ministers and heads of Japan's biggest firms, and ANA took a major award. In January 2020 the government launched a "Future Technology Fund" and picked avatar technology from 1,800 ideas for $1 billion of R&D. Kajitani felt Japan had finally got the picture; everything was snowballing.
Then, as Covid-19 lockdowns spread, the movement took off. After four years of evangelizing, the founders were surprised by how fast and how widely mindsets shifted. Several deployments, some for the 2020 Olympics, were canceled, but avatars went to hospitals, schools and other places of need. When an early partner, owner of a small family cake company, urgently asked for a newme for his hospitalized elderly father, Fukabori drove one over himself, free, the next day.
In April 2020, after months of negotiation with ANA's board, avatarin, Inc. became an independent startup with the pair as co-CEOs, unusual for a Japanese company and impossible without Katanozaka and Tsuda. Katanozaka likened it to a plant whose buds had just appeared; he expected no profit, or even revenue, soon. The payoff he valued most had already begun: the founders showed that if top leaders express a vision, employees can build new businesses on their own, and others at ANA would follow, spreading a culture of innovation.
Many original volunteers and long-time ecosystem partners joined avatarin; one academic signed up to help change society technically and behaviorally. Among the co-CEOs' first acts was to set the company's values.
- Be human. Be open. Be bold. Be friendly.
- Be different. Be fast. Be healthy. Be positive.
- Be honest. Be fair. Be a team. Be the top.
2010 Fukabori and Kajitani meet on the 787 Dreamliner project.
2011 After the earthquake, Blue Wing coalition of 26 volunteers.
Early 2016 WonderFLY pitched; 6% statistic found.
Oct 2016 ANA wins the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit.
End 2017 Both full-time in the Digital Design Lab.
2018 XPRIZE launch, Avatar X Consortium, haptic-hand funding; own department.
Oct 2019 newme unveiled at CEATEC.
Jan 2020 Avatars selected for a $1 billion government fund.
Apr 2020 avatarin, Inc. spins out.
May 2020 Avatar installed on the ISS.
2022 NimbRo wins the $5 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE.
The authors list where things stand. Travelers at Haneda Airport approach avatarin robots to get service from remote ANA staff. The founders and JAXA met their deadline, installing an avatar on the ISS by May 2020, then launched a Space Avatar Project on avatar-enabled space travel and astronaut support. Large firms including Mitsubishi invested in avatarin. The ANA Avatar XPRIZE's $5 million first prize went to Germany's NimbRo, with teams from France and the United States second and third. Teleportation remains generations away, but an avatar-connected world is emerging.
Catalysts and the power of movement building
A leader need not be CEO to be a catalyst. Two values-driven engineers, lacking authority and resources, dared to try, and within a few years a global ecosystem of startups, technologists, corporates, nonprofits and governments was building toward an avatar future. Their insistence on cocreation and on bringing people along sets the tone, as does their view of technology as a tool for human ends, never an end in itself.
- Think big from any rank. Leaders should not shy from bold ideas wherever they sit. Catalysts get the snowball rolling toward a future they can neither see nor reach without others' collective genius.
- A purpose "big enough for everyone." Fukabori's phrase: a broad enough purpose becomes a platform for others' passions and expertise, and ideas can come from unexpected places.
- Inspire, don't instruct. Movement building was never telling people what to do or ignoring dissent. As storytellers, they framed the ambition in language local and personal to each audience: the marketing chief, ANA's board, startups, JAXA.
- Seeds as tangible opportunities. Inspiration became action through strategic investments and forums such as the XPRIZE and the JAXA consortium.
- Cultivate through dialogue. Sharing learning, celebrating partners' contributions, and above all linking each stakeholder's priorities to the emergent global agenda.
avatarin is a cross-generational story. Katanozaka and Tsuda trusted two unknown young engineers and protected work no normal KPI could measure. Kajitani admits they lacked the experience, connections or ability to win over middle management; the backing of top management made the difference.
The authors close the chapter by noting that an inclusive, inspiring, relatable idea can become a movement that drives innovation at great scale. But even willing partners may not yet be able to innovate under their constraints, and catalysts can create the conditions for them to do so. The next three chapters take mapping, seeding and cultivating in turn.
NimbRo is a University of Bonn research team, not a "robotics company." The January 2020 fund appears to be Japan's Moonshot R&D Program, whose first goal targets cybernetic avatars by 2050; its roughly 100 billion yen budget covered several goals, so "$1 billion for avatars" overstates avatars' share. Rhetorical numbers ($9 million in media value, "perfect mobility for 7.5 billion") come from the founders' pitch. The chapter shows avatarin's launch, not whether the business has become self-sustaining.
Mapping Uncharted Territory: Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli at African Food Changemakers
Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli spent more than two decades founding organizations across Nigeria's food system before she understood that her real role was that of a catalyst. Each venture added detail to her map of the problem, until she found the barrier nobody discussed: Africa's food entrepreneurs did not know or trust one another. For catalysts, mapping is discovery-driven, experiential learning: the real problem only appears once you act inside the system and keep remapping it.
Opening: abundance, and a narrative to change
The chapter's epigraph sets its theme: in traditional African communities people sit together in a circle, and Nwuneli sees technology as a way to recreate and scale those circles. The rest of the chapter shows how long it took her to reach that idea.
Nwuneli grew up in the Nigerian state of Enugu, picking guavas, mangos and avocados off neighborhood trees and handing them to anyone in need; her memory is of abundance for the whole community. At sixteen she moved to the United States and found that Western media and her classmates saw a very different continent, one whose face was a starving child. She did not deny Africa's real political and economic troubles, but she held that the Western story left out most of the picture, above all the potential of what was officially the world's fastest-growing population.
After a BS from Wharton and an MBA from Harvard, she set out in her early twenties to change the global narrative of Africa, beginning with the underlying problem of hunger. There was no ready path, so she charted her own, mapping the terrain as she went to decide where scarce resources would do most good. Three values guided her throughout:
- A generous view of people. She starts from the assumption that people have something to contribute.
- A deep sense of service. Her work is framed as obligation, not career.
- Compounding uplift. When one person lifts another, who lifts a third, the effect "turns into a force," in her phrase.
Hill, Tedards and Wild stress that she did not start out seeing herself as a catalyst; she discovered the role through time and experience, as she helped entrepreneurs forge Africa's future alongside her.
Mapping the African agricultural terrain
McKinsey and the first question
Early on, Nwuneli worked for McKinsey in the US and Africa, where she saw how multinational corporations both helped and harmed African agriculture. Studying Africa's place in global food supply chains, she met a startling fact: the continent held 60% of the earth's arable land and grew much of the world's food, yet still struggled to feed its own people. Her question was simply what was going wrong.
FATE Foundation: entrepreneurs as a talent pool
In 2002 she moved back to Nigeria full-time as the founding executive director of the FATE Foundation, the country's leading business incubator and accelerator. It was her first hands-on work with local businesses. The entrepreneurs she met were surviving in difficult and often hostile environments: they could not find consistent demand, let alone secure financing, build brands, create reliable supply chains, or find and develop talent. Yet their creativity and resilience inspired her. Instead of seeing them as victims needing charity, she came to see them as a talent pool capable of radically transforming Nigeria and perhaps the continent.
Two things tempered that hope. Many entrepreneurs were discouraged after decades of struggling for a livelihood. And there was a glaring gap: young people and women were largely absent, though she believed they could turn around Africa's agricultural future. Women especially seemed to lack the confidence to found agribusinesses.
She recognized that mindset from her own life. Arriving in the US, she had felt a total outsider, unsure what she could contribute, until several professors encouraged her and reshaped her self-image; they looked past a poor African student and "saw something in me." Her ambition became to spark that same confidence in women and young people so they could see themselves as part of a movement for change, and she chose her next moves accordingly.
LEAP Africa and NIA: education for the next generation
She left FATE to launch two nonprofits:
- LEAP Africa. The acronym stands for leadership, effectiveness, accountability and professionalism; its mission was to inspire and equip a new cadre of principled, disciplined young African leaders.
- Ndu Ike Akunuba (NIA). The name translates as life, strength and wealth; it supported female university students in Nigeria.
As a professor's daughter, she gave both one overarching strategy: use education to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs to build African solutions to African problems.
Mapping relationships, not transactions
Building LEAP and NIA forced her to map the web of relationships she needed, and she formed partnerships with local businesses, government, universities and civil-society leaders. Her reflection on this is one of the chapter's practical lessons: you do not need to be an extrovert; you need to value people and refuse to treat relationships as transactions. The question is not how someone can help you but what values you share and how to build a genuine bond, a stance she calls her "secret sauce." As her networks widened, so did her reputation in Nigeria for integrity, purpose and humility.
The diagnosis sharpens: waste and policy
Her widening contacts also gave her a more holistic view of the system. Smallholder farmers were growing enough staples and specialty crops to feed their region and more, but the food was not reaching the people who needed it. She identified two linked causes:
- Food waste. Systemic failures, from broken or missing distribution chains to fragmented markets, kept produce from reaching distribution centers, let alone tables; an estimated 40 to 60% of fruit harvested by local farmers went to waste. Farmers therefore would not plan or invest for growth, and local processors, where they existed, took the easy route of importing raw materials.
- Government policy. Policies were inconsistent and sometimes counterproductive. Farmers could not count on subsidies; trade deals might cut export tariffs and spur demand or cut import tariffs and undercut local sellers. Imported powdered milk was 15% cheaper than local milk purely because of trade policy. And even with better infrastructure, nobody was positioned to promote local products to regional buyers through marketing or economic diplomacy.
Building to outlive herself
As the pressures came into focus, so did new openings for her catalytic role, and she knew she had to stay flexible about where to put her energy. From the start she had built LEAP and NIA to "outlive her," with strong successors and boards. She describes this as the essence of being an enabler: build a team so you need not be everywhere at once, and recruit mission-driven high achievers who share the values and vision and hold you accountable. Having handed both organizations to trusted boards, she chose not to start another nonprofit but to become a food entrepreneur herself.
Nwuneli's first diagnoses (leadership gaps, institutions, broken supply chains) were accurate but incomplete. Each new organization put her in a different position in the system and showed her a layer that outside analysis had missed, which is why the authors treat mapping as action, not research.
Illuminating the "hidden middle"
AACE Foods: learning the pain firsthand
In 2009 Nwuneli and her husband Mezuo launched AACE Foods, which she called a for-profit "social enterprise." It sourced chilis, turmeric and maize from smallholder farmers (growers working just a few acres) and processed them into spices, seasonings and cereals for local markets and export. She found the experience "painful" and eye-opening. Until they ran their own agribusiness, she says, they could not grasp the scale of the hurdles others faced. There was no calling around for a ginger supplier and choosing among twenty vetted ones; suppliers who claimed they could deliver could not. The team had to map the farmers themselves and then teach them to weigh their ginger and remove the stones.
Sahel Consulting and catalytic ventures
At about the same time the couple founded Sahel Consulting, a management consulting and investment firm attacking institutional barriers in African food and agriculture: policy, limited access to capital markets, and missing financial and operational expertise. Like LEAP and NIA, it was built from an ecosystem of partnerships, working with global development finance institutions, foundations, governments, international development agencies and academic institutions. Its focus was helping Nigerian SMEs raise capital, write market-entry strategies, hire leaders, develop talent and set up financial and operational structures.
The two firms fed each other. Practical lessons at AACE filled in her map; when she spotted a barrier, she activated consultants in Sahel's "catalytic ventures" arm, which designed new interventions. When AACE could not find spice distributors, the AACE and Sahel teams launched a program to train women as distributors in bookkeeping, sales and logistics.
- 10,000 smallholder farmers in its sourcing network, a scale Nwuneli says she never predicted.
- 150 employees, many of them first-time job seekers.
- Benefits from family health insurance to adult literacy programs.
- 40 women who had previously spoken no English "graduated" in caps at the annual Christmas party, a moment that moved her to tears.
The lesson of the jump
The move from nonprofit to business taught her the chapter's first big lesson. The lifeblood of African agriculture was neither the multinationals nor the smallholder farmers, where development money flowed, but the SMEs, the "hidden middle" doing the heavy lifting to connect the dots. Building a single SME like AACE could empower dozens or hundreds of employees and the thousands of smallholders it bought from.
A cure for the "crab mentality"
In 2018 Nwuneli turned to the needs of SMEs and how they might catalyze innovation across the food sector. She interviewed more than 80 founders of food and agriculture SMEs about why they struggled to scale. The shortages of knowledge, tools, data and investment were well known. But the interviews surfaced a barrier nobody talked about: lack of trust among entrepreneurs. They were fragmented, did not know one another, and did not work together. In resource-constrained settings, she explains, you get the "crab mentality": secrecy, withdrawal and competitiveness, as crabs in a bucket pull down any that try to climb out. Nobody, she reasoned, can get much done in isolation.
That diagnosis reframed her challenge: for the ecosystem to reach its potential she had to drive cocreation among SMEs. She sized the prize from projected population growth:
- $1 a day per person spent on food implies an $876 billion annual African food market.
- $10 a day per person implies a market of about $9 trillion.
- $1 trillion: the food and agriculture industry she later aimed to help build by 2030.
Her answer to how generations of entrepreneurs could seize this was digital technology: give SMEs repeated chances to interact so that, over time, they build trust by seeing cocreation work for themselves.
Nourishing Africa by convening entrepreneurs
From informal advice to a digital circle
After nearly two decades in the sector, Nwuneli had become a trusted authority on agribusiness. Acquaintances and strangers sought her views on everything from crop rotation and marketing to trade and climate policy, and asked for contacts, endorsements and quick investment advice. Those organic exchanges crystallized her vision: this was exactly the kind of exchange that needed scaling. She imagined a digital "community circle" where food and agriculture entrepreneurs across the continent could share lessons and innovate together.
She hired a small team of young tech talent (software developers, digital communicators, entrepreneur-engagement specialists), all under thirty, digital-native millennials and Gen Zers, many in their first job. She wanted high achievers who woke up energized to make a difference; for her the work had to be "a calling," not a job.
The 2019 launch
In 2019, after the team was trained through Sahel's catalytic ventures arm, she launched Nourishing Africa, a digital platform she hoped would become "a home for one million entrepreneurs." It was a "one-stop shop" aggregating knowledge, training, connections and resources for every kind of African food entrepreneur, from farmers and processors to retailers, chefs and agtech firms. The aim was to help SMEs connect with trusted partners, grow, and build a $1 trillion food and agriculture industry by 2030.
- Entrepreneurs as content creators. Members published detailed, searchable public profiles of their businesses, so that others could say without reservation that they could trade with, invest in or partner with them.
- Quality over quick growth. Platform value depends on scale, but she refused fast growth that might admit people wearing digital "masks"; one scandal could destroy the membership and everything tied to it.
- No fee, but a social contract. A fee would exclude the underserved SMEs she meant to reach, so membership rested on reciprocity: members should be as eager to give as to get.
- High barriers to entry. A lengthy application and vetting process screened out bad actors.
- Obligations to participate. Members had to post and join community events (online or in person) regularly, which deterred free riders.
- Member recruitment. Once members experienced the value, they were encouraged to bring in other SMEs.
- Paid partners, not paying members. Using her local and global networks, she recruited organizations that paid to reach otherwise hard-to-reach SMEs and contributed content, data, services and connections.
- Face-to-face meetings. Technology is a huge enabler but can turn destructive without regulation or ethical fiber; seeing people in person, she says, reveals their character.
The paying partners fell into clear groups, which the authors list in full:
- Sources of finance. Banks, accelerators, incubators, private equity and venture capital funds, and sponsors of prizes or challenges.
- Social and public bodies. Foundations, nonprofits and government agencies.
- Industry bodies. Industry and trade associations.
- Knowledge partners. Business schools, training groups and research organizations.
- Media outlets and corporations. Media, plus companies searching for SME suppliers.
Building trust by modeling values
Built to outlast her, staffed by guardians
As before, she prepared the venture to outlast her: she set up a board, hired co-CEOs, and worked hard to instill values that would guide the team's decisions. She saw her staff as guardians of trust, responsible for vetting candidates, brokering partnerships and running the platform and its community events.
Respected rather than loved
Trust, she believed, had to come with an uncompromising stand on quality. At her first nonprofit she wanted to be loved; now she was content simply to be respected, because the work was bigger than any individual and too important to do shoddily. Her hard-nosed manner sometimes rubbed team members the wrong way, the authors concede, but nobody doubted that she had the long-term good of the whole ecosystem in view. When the inevitable misstep happened she did not dwell on it; her one question was "How fast can we fix it?"
Sharing the network
She also shared her contacts with the team so they could become catalysts too, with high expectations attached: each person should treat the relationship as their own and show up and deliver. She sent team members to represent Nourishing Africa at industry meetings, media events, SME gatherings and international conferences, as chances to grow their own networks and reputations.
A living platform
Finally she taught the team to listen to stakeholders and respond to emergent needs, which the authors call a key catalyst principle. The platform had to be living to keep trust and momentum: with trust, credibility and responsiveness, people "will give and they will get." She required constant surveys to take the platform's pulse and innovation in response to feedback, reasoning that an ecosystem changing daily punishes anyone not ready to respond. By modeling these values she gave the team the mindset to build relationships one at a time.
Prioritizing digital resilience
The Covid shock
The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic devastated Africa's agricultural communities. Millions of consumers cut spending to essentials; processors and distributors cut costs, leaving upstream SMEs with no sales channels. When the team surveyed members, fully half could not imagine their businesses reopening.
Nwuneli found hope in other sectors. Apparel SMEs, for instance, were moving sales and marketing onto WhatsApp, Instagram and LinkedIn, building online marketplaces and going direct to consumer. Digital tools were plainly the way through, but the smallest entrepreneurs did not know how to pivot, and their failure would ripple through whole communities.
The training nobody joined
Scanning for partners, the team found many international organizations building programs to help SMEs go digital, and launched a series of partnerships, including one with a global foundation, to cocreate a training series for agricultural entrepreneurs. Nwuneli admits they should have started much earlier: Covid was "a wake-up call."
When the program launched, nobody signed up. The team had to build what were, for them, "unusual relationships" with local and state governments, community and faith-based organizations, and trade and women's associations: groups SMEs already trusted but which the team had largely neglected. Only grassroots bodies could persuade the entrepreneurs to take part.
Cocreation in lockdown
Meanwhile the team matched SMEs with agtech companies, and thousands of small agrifood businesses began collaborating. With startups' help, farmers used sensing technology to monitor crops remotely during lockdowns, and app-based motorbike taxis, which used to carry passengers, began carrying food to farms and shops, becoming key links in the supply chain. This was the cocreation Nwuneli had hoped for; in her words, the whole ecosystem was evolving.
The pandemic, unexpectedly, made the seeds of a movement sprout and made the role of SMEs in economies starker. As members shared innovation stories on the platform, momentum built fast because people badly needed the support and information. A new roster of partners offered to fund e-learning and other programs. Nwuneli's explanation: SMEs drive innovation and jobs and are small enough to pivot in a crisis, often more agile and closer to the grassroots than large firms. The Nigerian Export Promotion Council, for example, asked Nourishing Africa to design and run a program helping 5,000 Nigerian entrepreneurs build capacity to export food to the rest of Africa and the world.
Prey or productive assets
By 2022 Nourishing Africa had served more than 10,000 small businesses and had 2,000 members. Two new revenue streams appeared: advertising and data. SMEs were still hard to reach, so multinationals offered significant money for their attention and even more for the platform's information. Nwuneli ran due diligence on every partner and judged each deal by the value it added for SMEs, always asking who saw her entrepreneurs "as prey versus productive assets and communities." One large company proposed a multimillion-dollar project that would have produced useful information for members, but wanted the email list in return; she vetoed it at once as a step too far.
Maintaining momentum when trust is broken
In 2021 the global foundation funded an e-learning program to help entrepreneurs recover from Covid, plus grants of 3 million naira (about $3,000) for 125 of the roughly 1,000 firms selected. Applicants pitched their business and how the money would aid recovery; independent judges visited businesses to verify stories. About 30,000 applied, 1,000 completed the training, and 300 applied for grants. Pitching and evaluation went smoothly and 125 winners were chosen, but before payout a foundation official called: an anonymous email claimed the recipient list was phony.
Forensic auditors found that a Nourishing Africa employee had taken bribes to tamper with results. Worse, two colleagues had heard rumors and accepted his vague reassurances; without the whistleblower the scheme might have worked. With the board, Nwuneli fired the employee and pressed legal charges, let the two who had looked away go, canceled the program and returned the money to the foundation.
The episode shook the team and the foundation, and hundreds of applicants were disappointed and angry. Nwuneli drew three lessons. Trust is fragile, and a single bad actor can threaten an ecosystem of thousands built over years. She had to spend even more time on talent development, instilling values and judgment. And from then on every meeting opened with a review of organizational values and how they applied to daily work.
She refused to let a few people spoil a movement that was changing thousands of lives. In 2022 she converted Nourishing Africa from a for-profit into a nonprofit and merged it with a pandemic-era initiative of hers aimed at raising global awareness and demand for African food.
Turning crisis into opportunity
African Food Changemakers
The merged organization, African Food Changemakers (AFC), united the two long strands of her career: building Africa's food supply ecosystem and changing the world's narrative about it, on the conviction that connections made through food change narratives. Almost all of Nourishing Africa's community programs moved into AFC's portfolio.
The fraud shaped one founding rule: AFC would never distribute funds to entrepreneurs. It would connect members to private equity and venture capital, let them search funding opportunities on the site, and supply knowledge, data, access, linkages and community, acting as a "bridge to funders" without touching the money. The goal was to be so relevant that members would stay and draw others in.
New leadership and structure
- Ruth Egbe. An engineer with 20 years in human-resource management and organizational development, brought in to lead the young organization; she introduced new structures and processes.
- Nosa Obano. A staff member who warned that heavy reliance on remote collaboration was eroding value; he was put in charge of recruiting "ambassadors", SMEs across the continent who help map local ecosystems and deliver activities tailored to their communities.
- Measurement. Nwuneli and Egbe built rich monitoring and evaluation systems and pushed the team to use data on four impact metrics.
- SME empowerment and growth.
- Job creation and economic impact.
- Community building and collaboration.
- Innovation and sustainability.
Storytelling and food diplomacy
With Egbe running operations, Nwuneli returned to her original passion: creative storytelling about Africa's contribution to global food, its culinary heritage and its future. Taking inspiration from Japan and Korea, which exported culture through sushi and Korean barbecue, team member Bushirah Abdulrahaman was tasked with doing the same for dishes like jollof rice, a staple of Nigeria and Ghana. AFC collaborated on a Netflix series about African American cuisine, founded an annual food festival, created a podcast and produced a stream of documentary videos.
Nwuneli dreams that jollof rice will one day be more popular than sushi, and of a "Sourced from Africa" label on packaging, like "Gluten free." She wants American shoppers to see "Made with cocoa from Ghana" on chocolate bars, to know that fine turmeric comes from Nigeria, and to realize their sesame bagel uses sesame from Sudan, which changes how they see Sudan and, over time, benefits African farmers.
Changing mindsets at home
The narrative work pushed AFC to change mindsets on the continent too. At a Cairo trade fair it held a jollof cooking contest that was a wild success, until Nwuneli learned that the plantains for one recipe came from Costa Rica. Nobody had asked AFC members to supply them, though she was sure someone would have. Her reading: it goes back to trust, since people need to trust the community to step up when there is a need, which is why it exists.
- 6,600+ SME members in 48 of Africa's 54 countries, split equally between SMEs working directly with farmers and other food players (processors, retailers, chefs).
- 1,500+ food entrepreneurs trained through workshops and programs.
- Coalitions formed organically and with AFC help, for example to lobby on dairy tariff policy or share climate-smart practices.
- 1 million: the original membership goal, which the authors judge within reach if values-centered connections hold.
The effect on once-isolated entrepreneurs is the payoff she values most: newcomers are amazed by the support and say they no longer feel alone, and people now introduce themselves to her around the world as "African Food Changemakers," which she takes as evidence that a movement is forming.
How catalysts map their ecosystem
The authors close with what Nwuneli's path shows about the catalyst's first task, mapping:
- Discovery, not design. She did not set out as a catalyst; she discovered the role, and how to play it, by mapping problems and opportunities across a career.
- Experiential learning. Mapping means leaving your organization, immersing yourself in on-the-ground reality, and being curious about the people you hope to activate. Research matters, but catalysts learn mainly through interactions.
- Networks fill the contours. Broad networks of trusted relationships reveal the problems and opportunities, the key stakeholders, how they relate, the barriers they face, and the enablers (such as emergent coalitions) that can be used.
- The hidden problem surfaces late. She first blamed leadership deficits, institutional barriers and fragmented supply chains. Only as an industry actor did she find the underlying social problem: SMEs could not collaborate because they lacked trust, and strangers will not risk scarce resources together.
- Zoom in and out. Through iterative mapping and remapping, catalysts move between problems on the ground and the purpose they serve, learning what conditions an innovative ecosystem needs; hers included leadership development, trust-building and digital resilience.
- Purpose sustains the journey. Charting unknown territory brings missed turns, detours and dead ends; her purpose and values gave her the tenacity to keep going, and every organization built on the human potential already present.
| Stage | Position in system | What the map showed | Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| McKinsey | Outside adviser | Huge land, yet hunger | Return to Nigeria |
| FATE, 2002 | Incubator head | Talent; women and youth missing | LEAP, NIA |
| LEAP, NIA | Nonprofit founder | Waste and bad policy block food flows | Become an operator |
| AACE, Sahel, 2009 | Food entrepreneur | SMEs are the hidden middle | Focus on SMEs |
| 2018 interviews | Researcher-convener | Crab mentality, no trust | Digital community |
| Nourishing Africa, 2019 | Platform builder | Covid gaps; trust is fragile | Grassroots allies, no money |
| AFC, 2022 | Movement leader | Narrative and trust at home | Storytelling, ambassadors |
In 2024, leaving AFC's operations with Egbe and the team, Nwuneli moved to Washington, DC, as president and CEO of the nonprofit ONE, which campaigns for equity, justice and investment in economic opportunity and health in Africa; the authors present this as a natural continuation of her catalyst path. She now describes herself as a "destiny helper": someone whose morning is well spent if all she did was make sure two people who should know each other met.
The 60% of arable land figure is usually stated as Africa's share of the world's uncultivated arable land (AfDB, McKinsey), not of all arable land. The $876 billion estimate implies roughly 2.4 billion consumers, a mid-century population projection rather than today's ~1.5 billion. The chapter relies heavily on Nwuneli's own account; outcomes for members are reported as counts (members, trainees, countries), not measured income or growth gains, and the grant fraud is told only from the organization's side.
Seeding a Global Culinary Revolution: Massimo Bottura, Lara Gilmore, and the Francescana Family
Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore turned a small osteria in Modena into the "Francescana Family": restaurants, a guesthouse and a global network of community kitchens spanning two worlds that rarely meet, elite dining and the underserved. The chapter illustrates the catalyst function of seeding: activating a generation of chefs to drive innovation in their own communities. Their method was to build "canvases" on which chefs could express their own slice of genius, then let them go to become catalysts elsewhere, "using values to create value."
Opening: an unlikely pair
Two epigraphs frame the chapter. Bottura's says that alone he is just himself, but together the team is Osteria Francescana; Gilmore's says the point is the ecosystem's value, not only their own. Both point to the theme: the restaurant as a collective that seeds others.
On paper the founders of a restaurant twice named the best in the world looked mismatched:
- Massimo Bottura. An aspiring chef from Modena, whose happiest childhood memories were at the feet of his mother and grandmother as they rolled fresh tortellini; outside the kitchen he raced Italian cars with his brothers and rode motorcycles across the hills of Emilia-Romagna.
- Lara Gilmore. Born in Washington, DC, she studied art history, worked for a photography magazine and apprenticed in contemporary art galleries.
In spring 1993 both took part-time jobs at an Italian café in SoHo. He told stories of his big Modena family; she took him to theater, contemporary art and artists' studios on the Lower East Side. He was fast and impulsive, she pensive and attentive, yet each found they learned more about themselves in conversation with the other than with anyone else. Neither imagined that within two decades they would catalyze a global movement carrying Modena's food culture to the world.
The Francescana Family, their name for the venture, now spans their restaurants, dozens of chefs they trained, scores of volunteers, entrepreneurs, artists, businesses and governments they partner with, thousands of diners who book months ahead, and hundreds of thousands of people served by their social enterprises. Their ethos, "using values to create value," meant scaling a family business through quality food, culture and community, and giving chefs "canvases" to cocreate a more just and sustainable food future with local partners.
The culture of Modena: slow food, fast cars
In 1995, two years after meeting, they took over an osteria in the center of Bottura's hometown and replaced it with a contemporary Italian restaurant. An osteria is the most casual class of Italian eatery, yet they kept the old name, Osteria Francescana, an "interesting contradiction" given that they wanted a Michelin star. They married three months later; Gilmore often says she married the restaurant first, then the chef, and so married the project.
Modena is a small city known for some of Italy's iconic foods: balsamic vinegar, Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto and mortadella, whose centuries-old traditions give Emilian ingredients a noble place in the Italian pantry. The region is also full of family businesses turned global brands. Ferrari began as a family venture, inspired Maserati and Lamborghini, and spawned a dense network of local automotive suppliers. Gilmore senses that here you can rise from nothing; Bottura calls it the American dream in Modena.
Bottura was troubled, though, by how much had been lost since his childhood through the decline of family farms and the rise of industrial agriculture. His training made him a follower of Slow Food, the movement founded in 1986 by Italian activist and writer Carlo Petrini to secure good, clean food at fair prices, resist fast food, preserve regional cuisines and support sustainable farming. The couple grounded the restaurant in Slow Food's tenets and paired them with the region's other pillar, fast cars, which Bottura says shape how he thinks and moves. Hence their guiding phrase: "slow food, fast cars."
From theory to practice: festina lente
Tradition in evolution
Bottura the culinary wizard and Gilmore the artistic visionary were ready to risk everything on something unprecedented. Most Italian peers perfected renditions of the national cuisine; Bottura wanted a once-in-a-lifetime experience fusing tradition and innovation. His catchphrase, coined in 1998, was "tradition in evolution": he breaks tradition constantly because he looks at the past critically, not nostalgically.
- Tortellini Walking on Broth. Instead of floating tortellini in rich capon broth, he lined them up on a thin layer of broth thickened with agar. The dish honored his mother, grandmother and Lidia Cristoni, a village woman who first taught him pasta, and was a deliberate provocation: was the diner paying attention to a 500-year-old tradition?
- Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano. He made the cheese, normally grated over pasta, the protagonist, using nothing else; the dish came to stand for his ability to draw out the many textures and flavors of Modena.
Hospitality as the whole experience
The innovation went beyond cooking. Gilmore saw their work as hospitality that began not when diners sat down for four hours but the moment they booked. The couple choreographed the experience to surprise and even disorient: an intimate contemporary room hung with avant-garde art from their own collection, set with traditional plateware and crystal; a kitchen adding twists and word plays to classic flavors; and servers using storytelling to explain each dish's deeper meaning, often reaching into the world of ideas.
Resistance, and an ecosystem answer
Modena and the Italian public did not warm to the modernist spin. Gilmore notes that playing with classics is both the most exciting and the riskiest thing, and lists Italy's three unbreakable rules:
- The Pope. Never speak badly of him.
- The national soccer team. Never criticize it.
- Grandmother's recipes. Never tamper with them.
"Slow food, fast cars" guided them through this slow resistance to change. The team worked daily with local farmers, butchers and cheesemakers, insisting on empathy, respect and trust with neighbors. Almost unwittingly they adopted an ecosystem mindset, treating the restaurant as a platform for the community's treasures: they named artisans and producers on menus, urged guests to visit them, and made their marketing about Modena and Emilia-Romagna rather than themselves. Gilmore saw a modest scene of hard-working farmers and hearty food as potentially magical. Local attitudes shifted slowly, and as gourmets made pilgrimages, even harsh skeptics softened.
Then, in 2001, luck intervened. A prominent Italian food writer stopped for lunch on a drive between Milan and Rome, published a piece a week later, and within months the restaurant won its first Michelin star.
Gilmore's Latin motto festina lente, "hurry, slowly," joins two opposites. For the couple it meant asking how to add long-term value to everything done daily, and in practice it meant scaling by empowering people inside and outside the restaurant. Bottura began treating the osteria as a vehicle for building relationships among local players, bridging Ferrari and Lamborghini, Parmigiano, Lambrusco, balsamico and prosciutto: not one or the other but all together, with a far louder voice.
Stars are made, not born
A brigade run by a mentor
After the first star the couple plotted a path to three stars and knew they could not get there alone: they needed cocreation in the kitchen. Bottura kept the brigade model of gourmet kitchens, with station leads reporting to the executive chef, but saw himself as head mentor rather than general. The aim was a community in which chefs played as a team rather than merely sitting on one. Before each evening service the whole staff gathered at a communal table to eat together, laugh, reflect on the previous night, brainstorm new approaches and settle details.
Tasting with novices
A sous chef describes how Bottura sought diverse opinions while creating. He would plate venison, find a twenty-year-old who had never cooked meat and had nothing to do with that dish, and taste it with them, asking how they felt about the cooking and the sauce. He needs a dialogue with someone with zero experience. The authors read this as a guard against the expert's trap of sticking with what one knows instead of questioning basic assumptions and experimenting.
"Who are you?"
To help chefs develop their own identities as innovators, Bottura ran an exercise called "Who are you?" When he put the question to Bernardo Paladini, aged 21, the confused newcomer replied simply that he was Bernardo. Once he understood, he called it the most beautiful exercise he had ever done, and made a raviolo gathering all the flavors of his city, Rome. Co-sous chef Allen Huynh explains the rule: chefs represent themselves on a plate in any way they like, using any material and resource in the kitchen, to sum up their gastronomic voice.
The trio and the second star
The second star came in 2006, which the couple credited largely to a trio of young chefs: Taka Kondo and Yoji Tokuyoshi from Japan, and Davide Di Fabio, from a rural village in Abruzzo, who joined straight out of high school at eighteen. Gilmore insists a kitchen is never about one chef: the three arrived at about the same time, became its heart and soul, ran it with Bottura, and developed and executed the recipes nightly. When invitations came to cook abroad, Bottura took them along, introduced them as "my trio," and brought them from behind the kitchen to the front stage. He rejected the role of solo genius and thrived on diversity of thought.
Grow like a tree; the dropped tart
Local naysayers kept disapproving. Gilmore says changing centuries of culinary tradition takes effort, risk and the determination to hold on through a storm while learning who you are and reinventing. Bottura's kitchen motto for resilience was "Be like a tree. Grow slowly." The team chased perfection, but he made clear that mistakes are part of collaborating, experimenting and learning.
In the middle of a busy service Taka Kondo dropped a finished tart, which splattered on the floor. The kitchen went silent waiting for Bottura's reaction. He looked at the mess and shouted to the mortified Kondo that it was beautiful. Using the wreck as a guide, he had Kondo break the remaining lemon tarts and arrange the pieces on new plates. The result, "Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart," closed the seven-course "Come to Italy with Me" menu, a tribute to southern Italy, without which the Italian kitchen could not exist. Gilmore says it combined everything a three-star restaurant should be (flavor, technique, quality of experience and front-of-house storytelling), and that broken, it caught the south better than a perfect tart could.
In 2011 the restaurant won its third Michelin star and was named fourth best in the world. Bottura traces that star to Kondo's mistake.
The kitchen as an innovation launchpad
The authors state a catalyst principle: catalysts treat talent as seeds, nurture them, and when they sprout step aside to give them room.
After the third star the kitchen went through what Bottura called "a revolution" in its identity. Tokuyoshi was ready to move on, then Di Fabio. Gilmore recalls that letting them go was hard for Bottura, but he understood they needed their next project, where they could shine. If his chefs were to spread the slow-food, fast-cars movement, they had to become catalysts in their new homes. Tokuyoshi opened a restaurant in Milan; Di Fabio became chef at a restaurant nearer his hometown. Both soon earned Michelin stars of their own.
Learning to let go also forced the couple to recruit and prepare the next generation more deliberately. Canadian chef Jessica Rosval arrived at the end of 2013 and credits her place to Gilmore's challenge to an old industry prejudice: Gilmore found the women on the team an apartment in the city center next to the restaurant and kept telling Bottura to hire more women. Rosval had run a whole kitchen in Canada but was given a single station; on day one she had to teach two Italian cooks a menu she did not know, in a language she did not speak. Gilmore calls learning her first superpower, together with deep conceptual thinking and a demand for excellence in everything. Within a few years Rosval was cooking at Bottura's side at prestigious events worldwide.
Planting seeds for the future: from local to global
Saving Parmigiano
In 2012 two massive earthquakes hit northern Italy, killing dozens and displacing tens of thousands. Among damaged buildings were the warehouses holding slow-to-age Parmigiano Reggiano: 360,000 wheels were damaged, risking losses of up to $50 million and threatening many of the region's oldest artisanal family dairies. Gilmore says they used their voice to help the dairy farmers, and then grew more active on other social issues; buying cheese was the start; they wanted to activate bigger changes.
The trigger was Bottura's version of cacio e pepe ("cheese and pepper"), which used every part of the wheel and swapped pasta for rice, a more universal ingredient. He promoted it at a virtual event watched by more than 40,000 people. Buyers from Argentina to South Africa bought huge amounts of the cheese; no local cheesemaker lost a job, and the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium created Parmigiano Reggiano Day.
What you do with the stars
Soon after, Gilmore stood at home looking at Bottura's chef jacket, now embroidered with three stars. The couple realized that the worth of the long climb lay in what you do with the stars once you have them. They had worked seventeen years for that benchmark and found that along the way they had built value, capacity and agility. They flipped their focus outward, to sharing what they had learned to help others grow.
They adopted a calling to "plant seeds for the future," influenced by German artist Joseph Beuys and his phrase "Never stop planting." At a career peak they committed to planting ideas in every action, word, recipe, structure, restaurant and community activity of the Francescana Family, so that a wider talent pool and clientele would, in Gilmore's words, carry the seeds of impact worldwide.
Food for Soul: feeding the planet in a new way
The Milan refettorio
In 2015 Milan hosted the World Expo, themed "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life." The couple used it to tackle the twin problems they knew well as restaurateurs, food waste and food insecurity, and cofounded a nonprofit cultural association, Food for Soul. They modeled it on the dining they knew best: take perfectly good surplus food from the Expo, classed as waste, and turn it into a dignified meal, mainly for unhoused and low-income people, a clientele a restaurant like theirs would never reach. Their target was what Gilmore calls the "absurdity" that nearly one-fifth of food produced globally is thrown away while nearly one in ten people are undernourished.
Drawing on decades of social capital, they approached a Catholic relief agency, academic institutions, high-profile chefs and even the Vatican. Together they turned an abandoned theater in a poor Milan suburb into a refettorio (community kitchen), installed a professional kitchen and hung work by world-renowned artists they admired. Jill Conklin, Food for Soul's director and strategic officer, calls it an experiment in redefining the art of service: taking everything learned at the osteria, and their identity as social entrepreneurs from tradition-rich Modena, into a new social space.
More than 60 internationally known chefs, including Bottura's mentor Alain Ducasse, cooked there during the Expo. Bottura wanted colleagues to show that chefs can be more than the sum of their recipes. The refettorio was not a "give back" but a rich gastronomic experience for a new clientele and a reimagining of surplus food. Bottura's line is that Food for Soul is "not a charity project, it is a cultural one." What makes the difference, he says, is service, hospitality and beauty: guests are welcomed and promised care, asked whether they prefer sparkling or still water, served appetizer, main and dessert, and told to take their time.
"Why not?"
When the Expo closed, Bottura assumed the refettorio would simply be left to Milan as their legacy. Not long after, the phone rang very early one morning: the mayor of Rio de Janeiro wanted a refettorio for the Olympics the following year (2016). Bottura's reply was "Why not?" They had, without knowing it, sparked a movement.
The cocreation model spreads: Refettorio Harlem
Globally inspired, locally rooted
Over the following months business and government leaders worldwide asked for refettorios in their cities. A one-off Milan project became a global food-justice movement run on Francescana Family values, and Food for Soul spread to 13 cities and counting, from London to Mérida, Mexico. The couple knew they lacked local knowledge in most places, so they recruited on-the-ground stakeholders to cocreate a localized version each time. Conklin's summary: every partner brings its own experience, and Food for Soul is "globally inspired and locally rooted."
Planting seeds back in New York
By 2018 Food for Soul reached the United States with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose first joint project would be a refettorio in New York, the city where the couple had met. They planned Refettorio Harlem for 2019 near Emanuel AME Harlem Church, a historic civil rights hub that acted as site partner and helped convert its community hall. Free Food Harlem, which served anyone needing food help and social connection, was another key partner. Roxanne Jimenez, then Food for Soul's social impact and sustainability manager, stressed partners with "boots on the ground" who could codesign solutions fitting their communities.
Bringing a local ecosystem together takes hands-on attention. Bottura and Gilmore usually visit early in a refettorio's development to make the design inclusive and welcoming and to tap their network for resources. In Harlem hangs a huge photograph donated by the artist JR, a friend who shares their belief in art as social change: it shows the US-Mexico border in 2017, a reminder of the aim to break down physical and metaphorical borders through food, culture and community. For Gilmore, art is the couple's source of ideas; their long relationships with artists have shaped their decisions and the depth of Bottura's dishes.
Handing it to the locals
Once the way was paved, they entrusted local chefs and volunteers with the whole experience, from prepping surplus food to greeting guests and refilling water glasses. Jimenez, based in New York but overseeing refettorios globally, describes her approach to local staff as asking what they can teach her and what knowledge a partner, manager or chef holds; pooling that knowledge, she says, is Food for Soul.
- 27,000+ meals delivered.
- 52,000+ lb of food saved from waste.
- 3,300 guests served.
- 10,000: the number of refettorios worldwide Bottura says he wants, a goal volunteer Ellen Port adopted as her own mission after hearing him, calling the model a scalable win-win ecosystem.
Casa Maria Luigia: another platform for cocreation
A home away from home
In 2018 the couple told their Modena team they would buy a 250-year-old farmhouse in the Emilian countryside. They named it Casa Maria Luigia after Bottura's late mother and made it a twelve-room (and growing) luxury guesthouse among corn fields and vegetable gardens, with an acetaia, a traditional balsamic vinegar cellar. The mantra was the Modenese welcome: good morning, welcome, come in, we will take good care of you. It was to be a home away from home where visitors to the region and its Francescana Family venues could experience Emilian stories, recipes and hospitality.
- Art. Contemporary pieces from their collection, from a Warhol in the kitchen to an Ai Weiwei in the main entry.
- Record room. Bottura's collection of over 1,000 vinyl records.
- Playground. Exercise equipment plus his Italian sports cars and motorcycles.
- Open house. Guests could wander, take snacks or wine from the communal kitchen, and explore odd corners; no two rooms were alike, because Gilmore wanted discovery and an invitation to fantasy, not a uniform hotel.
Some doubted the move from restaurateurs to hoteliers, but for the couple it was about the long-term development of Modena. Bottura says his dream was always to bring people there, but it is no longer about them; it is about laying a foundation for future generations to discover the region.
Rosval finds her canvas
Jessica Rosval was among the internal skeptics. As events chef she kept visiting during private events while the kitchen and dining room were set up, started bringing things in and getting attached, and grew protective when the couple mentioned bringing in other chefs. They noticed, offered her the head chef role, and she accepted. Casa Maria Luigia opened on May 1, 2019, and within a month Rosval's team served the first "Francescana at Casa Maria Luigia" dinner, featuring iconic Osteria Francescana dishes retired from the flagship. People who had waited years for a table at the osteria now had a second venue.
The movement takes on a life of its own
Roots
Following the couple's example, Rosval wanted meaningful work for Italy's growing migrant population. In 2020 she cofounded the Association for the Integration of Women with Caroline Caporossi, a former Food for Soul intern. The social enterprise ran culinary training for migrant women, let them share food traditions from home, and helped them put down roots in Modena. It led in 2022 to Roots, an eatery and coworking space where many of the same women cook a menu of dishes and stories from their home countries. Bottura credits its success to Rosval's team thinking deeply about who the women are, so that cooking became a social process turning ideas into food. Rosval and Caporossi won a Champion of Change award from The World's 50 Best Restaurants.
Al Gatto Verde
A few years after Rosval moved to Casa Maria Luigia, the couple gave her a new "artistic challenge": she would paint with her own food and they would build the background. Bottura's principle: scaling the business happens when there is a need to scale talent, so they built a new place and told Rosval it was her canvas. In fall 2023 she became head chef of Al Gatto Verde, a second restaurant at the guesthouse, winning her first Michelin star and first green (sustainability) star. The same year Casa Maria Luigia won three Michelin keys, the top hospitality honor. Rosval says what keeps her is the feeling that you are always building.
Tirelessly sowing more seeds of opportunity
Moving people around
As restaurants and refettorios multiplied, the couple thought hard about distributing chefs across venues to empower them; one team member says they keep tricks up their sleeve behind the curtain. Gilmore's recurring questions were which chef to send to create the next venture, and how to keep the family identity while giving people the freedom to create, grow and build their own reputations. Bottura's answer is that true success requires moving people around within the community, and his chefs all belong to it.
- Karime Lopez. Mexican chef from a top Lima restaurant who came to Modena on marrying Taka Kondo; Gilmore had her test and write recipes for a book rather than join the osteria line. Bottura offered her Gucci Osteria in Florence, their first Gucci partnership; within two years she won a star, the first Mexican woman chef ever to do so. Kondo joined her and they became co-executive chefs in 2022; she relishes that a Mexican woman and a Japanese man run a top restaurant on one of Italy's great piazzas.
- Mattia Agazzi. Lopez's sous chef, chosen to open Gucci Osteria Beverly Hills without losing Modena-style quality. He says Bottura makes you the next protagonist and that, even when you disagree, your belief in him makes you listen. Weeks after taking over he and his team worked with the Hollywood Food Coalition, serving about 10,000 meals in two months and teaching soup-kitchen cooks to make pasta and clean fish. The restaurant won a star in 2021, under two years after opening.
- Jessica Rosval. From one station in 2013 to head chef of Casa Maria Luigia, cofounder of Roots, and starred chef of Al Gatto Verde.
- Yoji Tokuyoshi and Davide Di Fabio. The first alumni seeded out after 2011, both starred in their own kitchens.
Gilmore draws the moral: great chefs are more than the sum of their recipes; they ask what their skill can do for society, not only for their careers.
With a little help from my friends
Expansion did not stop the couple cultivating talent at the Modena base. When Italy's Covid-19 lockdown ended, Bottura called his Osteria Francescana cooks back with one condition: first each had to listen to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and create a new dish. Gilmore says his aim was to keep everyone connected and send their minds on a journey. The team, each inspired by a different song and unaware why, spent the first days in chaotic, energetic experimentation. Just before reopening they learned that their dishes would form a new tasting menu, named after a song on the album: "With a Little Help from My Friends."
When does a great chef tell his cooks, in a three-star restaurant, "Now you make the menu"?
Rosval attributes it to Bottura's confidence and willingness to share success and the spotlight, and to how much the team believes in what it communicates and in the family.
Lessons from a seeding success story
Think local, act global
The couple reverse the familiar slogan: "think local, act global." Thirty years on, they still call Osteria Francescana "the beating heart" of their work, and all roads, from a starred restaurant in Tokyo to a refettorio in Sydney, lead back to Modena. There they:
- Reimagined the Italian kitchen. They balanced innovation with tradition.
- Built social fabric. They learned how to strengthen the economy of Emilia-Romagna through relationships.
- Started a domino effect. The osteria led to Food for Soul, Casa Maria Luigia and other social enterprises.
- Used values to create value. They seeded opportunities worldwide for chefs and social entrepreneurs, each with distinct skills yet steeped in the slow-food, fast-cars mindset and the belief that food and culture multiply social impact.
- Culture. Knowing where food and tradition come from.
- Knowledge. Mastery of craft and ingredients.
- Awareness. Of the world beyond the kitchen; awareness, he says, leads to responsibility.
- Sense of responsibility. For each other, inside the group and outside it, toward the community.
He named these in June 2023 when the American Academy in Rome gave him a McKim Medal, telling the audience that the Francescana Family is a family united by shared values and a sense of responsibility to the community.
- 206 staff in Modena (up from 140 before the pandemic) and 500+ worldwide.
- 7 red (culinary) and 2 green (sustainability) Michelin stars across its ventures; Osteria Francescana twice named world's best restaurant.
- Food for Soul: 150,000+ volunteers, 3.5 million+ meals, 1 million+ guests since its founding.
What seeding means
The authors' conclusion: Bottura and Gilmore activated an innovation ecosystem by opening doors, creating canvases on which others express themselves, and keeping the door open to the unexpected, guided by the belief that if you keep searching, there is more future around the corner. For catalysts, seeding rests on two things: passing on deeply held values and giving people freedom to grow. Using food and culture, the couple launched a regenerative movement for food dignity and sustainability.
| Seeding move | Example | What it seeded |
|---|---|---|
| Ask chefs who they are | "Who are you?" plate exercise | Individual culinary identity |
| Credit the team publicly | "My trio" on stage abroad | Confidence, reputations |
| Turn mistakes into assets | Dropped lemon tart | Experimentation, third star |
| Let stars leave | Tokuyoshi, Di Fabio | Alumni catalysts, new stars |
| Lend the platform | Parmigiano cacio e pepe | Regional resilience |
| Partner locally | Refettorio Harlem | Locally run community kitchens |
| Build a canvas | Casa Maria Luigia, Al Gatto Verde | A new head chef's voice |
| Move chefs around | Lopez to Florence, Agazzi to LA | Venture leaders, community ties |
| Hand over the menu | Sgt. Pepper tasting menu | Collective authorship |
The book dates the McKim Medal "nine years after" the third star, but 2011 to 2023 is twelve years; it also calls the medal a "UNESCO intangible heritage" award, which garbles its nature (it is the Academy's own honor). Food for Soul is usually dated to 2016, when the association was formally set up after the 2015 Milan refettorio (Refettorio Ambrosiano), so "cofounded in 2015" compresses events. The account draws almost entirely on the couple and their protégés: the costs of the luxury side, staff turnover, working conditions in high-pressure kitchens and the economics of running refettorios are not examined.
Cultivating Frugal Innovation at Scale: Vineet and Anupama Nayar at Sampark Foundation
After a decade of writing checks, Vineet and Anupama Nayar found that their Sampark Foundation was changing nothing in India's public primary schools. They rebuilt it as a "disruptive design shop" that seeded frugal innovations (a teaching kit, a talking orange speaker, an offline TV box) and cultivated a chain of catalysts: field staff, teachers, officials and parents. Scaling innovation is ultimately about inviting others to own their future: find the value zone, make change contagious, then give people tools and systems to cocreate without you.
Opening: the year of many mistakes
Two epigraphs
Vineet's epigraph describes Sampark as open source: anyone may borrow and replicate it, because its reason to exist is reaching 20 million children, and the method is only a means. Anupama's describes putting themselves in the teachers' shoes, in front of poor children with no help at home and little exposure to the world, and asking how to bring the world to them. Between them they define the chapter: scale over ownership, empathy over technology.
Punjab, August 2014
In August 2014 the Nayars drove into a school compound on the edge of a village in rural Punjab, the first of ten schools they would visit that day. A decade before, with Vineet's mother, they had founded Sampark and committed $100 million of personal wealth to India's public primary education. Vineet's verdict on the result: they had been cutting checks, funding NGOs and trying ideas, and nothing was happening.
Vineet had stepped down in 2013 as CEO of HCL Technologies, whose turnaround into a world-leading IT services firm he had led. Since then he had become more hands-on, helping launch Sampark's biggest project: with the Punjab government and a local NGO, a kit of counting blocks, game boards and other tactile tools for 500 schools, meant to disrupt India's "factory model of education" built on rote learning.
The first classroom held thirty-plus children on mats, not desks, in a dark room with no electricity and bare concrete walls apart from one chalkboard. The teacher read English words from a textbook for the children to repeat; some did, by rote, others did not bother. Anupama was a teacher and Vineet a teacher's son, and this was not what learning should look like. The kit was nowhere in sight. It turned out to be unopened in the principal's office, with a stack of books and two tablets, because teachers feared that if anything went missing or broke, local officials would hold them responsible. The principal, polite but distracted, had bigger worries: nearly half the students and two teachers were absent, leaving him and one teacher to cover three classrooms of 100+ children.
Efforts, not outcomes
The Nayars had attended village government schools in the Himalayan foothills, so the poverty of resources did not surprise them. They knew that India's 2009 Right to Education Act had driven rapid enrollment growth that strained the system further, and that teacher and student absenteeism was chronic, especially where poor parents sent children to earn money instead. The other nine schools were just as colorless and dispirited. Vineet's diagnosis: teachers lacked the capacity to teach, parents the motivation to send children, so children lost interest; Sampark was teaching music to people who could not read the notes.
On the drive home Vineet asked Anupama what exactly they were trying to do. Like countless NGOs, Sampark was making no real difference. They had been content covering 500 schools and spending heavily, but were fooling themselves: their whole vocabulary was efforts, not outcomes. They needed a systemic approach, and the stakes were enormous, since 144 million children enrolled in public primary schools held India's future. Above all, Vineet insisted the answer had to be large scale: everyone works in small pockets and feels good about it, but without reaching the masses the problem never gets solved.
Vineet came to call 2014 "the year of many mistakes." The authors frame the chapter as the story of how the Nayars turned Sampark around and put new life into public education. Like earlier catalysts, they mapped stakeholders and seeded a movement with disruptive, frugal products; but the case goes further, into cultivating, because the mission was to help millions of children claim their dignity and self-determination by building the capacity of students, teachers, officials and communities to sustain the movement on their own.
Mapping out the "value zone"
Inspiration, not money
The Punjab pilot convinced the Nayars that India's education problem was less a lack of resources than a lack of inspiration. Government spending on education rose every year, yet outcomes were dismal.
- 6 in 10 grade-five children could not read a grade-two text.
- 8 in 10 could not do simple sums.
- 96% of school-age children started first grade, but more than a third dropped out before finishing primary school.
- 144 million children were enrolled in public primary schools.
Communities blamed teachers; parents who could afford it moved children to private schools. Teachers were swamped with administrative duties and often had to teach subjects, such as English, they had barely mastered themselves. Even well-meaning educators could hardly stay afloat.
The HCL parallel
The longer Vineet looked at Sampark, the more it reminded him of HCL in 2007, when he became CEO of a company stalled by low motivation, commitment and therefore innovation.
As IT outsourcing shifted from hardware to services, HCL's "value zone" (where value is created) moved from internal R&D to the interface between frontline employees and customers. Vineet inverted the organizational pyramid: the front line, long seen as the base, went to the top, and managers' job became to "enthuse, enable, and empower" it to innovate for customers. His mantra "Employees First, Customers Second" was fiercely controversial but paid off. By his exit in 2013 HCL's "value portal", where staff cocreated solutions with clients, had produced 7,000+ innovations worth an estimated $1 billion; revenue had grown from $700 million (2005) to $4.7 billion (2013) and headcount from 30,000 to 85,000 across 32 countries.
Teachers first
Only after Punjab did Vineet see the education system's true value zone: the relationship between teacher and child. Teachers were the frontline innovators to activate. But they sat inside, and answered to, a bureaucracy run by hundreds of thousands of officials who did not see the teachers' slices of genius. He reframed the challenge: could Sampark act as a catalyst so that the government's own investment began to yield results?
Anupama hesitated; catalyzing change through government sounded impossibly slow, complex and frustrating. After many debates they agreed that Sampark's purpose was quality education for children now and for future generations, and that the only scalable, sustainable route was to bring the existing system along, turning teachers into innovative change agents and officials into empowering enablers. Vineet saw the leadership gap: at HCL he inspired employees directly; in "Teachers First," regional and local administrators held command-and-control positions and every route to teachers ran through them. It would be ten times more difficult and ten times more powerful.
From philanthropy to disruptive design shop
Vineet had always said he would not run Sampark. Now the pretense of not being operational vanished, and he became CEO. The new vision was to turn a philanthropy into a "disruptive design shop." From business he knew how one innovation at the right price point can spread fast across industries and societies; Sampark would put disruptive products into classrooms that spread innovation through the system and made it contagious. To reach thousands of classrooms, they had to be frugal innovations.
They set a concrete goal: improve learning outcomes for 20 million children by 2025, then hand all materials and intellectual property to the public system and close Sampark down.
Seeding the ecosystem with technology
Design rules
The Nayars would not copy NGOs that drop iPads into schools without electricity. True to the name (sampark means "connections" in Hindi), products had to:
- Bond teachers and students. Nurture emotional ties in the classroom.
- Mend teacher-government relations. Improve the link between teachers and officials.
- Draw investment. Inspire officials to invest in the classroom experience.
- Engage parents. Compel parents to encourage their children's learning.
- Root education in community. Make schooling a pillar of community life.
Technology mattered only as far as it enabled the human experience. Vineet's theory of change: make the classroom exchange exciting and let the teacher take the credit; children return, and the whole system is encouraged. Products had to put the teacher at the center and be easy to understand, absorb and execute, and fun. If a child told a teacher "I love you," he argued, the feeling would be so contagious it would revolutionize everything.
Sampark Smart Shala
Product innovation was Anupama's domain. Decades of teaching had given her a deep feel for the psychological and social sides of learning that Indian education neglected. After painstaking research into global best practice and talks with rural teachers, she and a small team built Sampark Smart Shala, a math and English program for grades one to five.
- Pedagogy. The heart of the program: a shift from rote to fun activity-based learning, following children's natural cognitive path from concrete, real-world examples to abstract concepts.
- Kit of physical materials. Posters and game boards tailored to each state's required curriculum and to local language, culture and environment.
- Teacher training. Designed to make teachers' jobs easier, where most NGO materials added work.
- Monitoring system. Tracking whether pedagogy and materials were actually used.
Anupama insisted the content match children's lives. An ice cream cone meant nothing to them; pizza was useless for teaching fractions; vocabulary could not rely on tables and chairs absent from their homes. So, at great cost in time and effort, the team tailored every poster and board to its setting: counting with mangoes and guavas in one state, plums and peaches in another.
Getting into the states
Rollout was Vineet's domain and needed formal state permission. He understood officials' wariness: as one in Uttarakhand put it, NGOs promise X, Y and Z and then disappear. He built trust at the top of the chain of command. His brand as an ex-CEO opened doors to senior officials; private-sector experience taught him to stimulate demand for behavioral change; and his fluency in "the language of votes" (how better learning would show up at the ballot box) made them listen.
His rule was "if you want somebody to do something, make it easy for them." Sampark offered more than a world-class product tailored to the state: its team would train teachers, distribute materials and monitor the program in every school in the state. Sampark would pay at first, but over time the government would need skin in the game.
In 2014 he signed Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand to roll out Smart Shala in 40,000+ schools, true to his business habit of agreeing to impossible goals and working out delivery later. Rajat Kumar, joint secretary to Chhattisgarh's chief minister, recalls that Sampark understood the state wanted coverage of all schools, not "islands of great results"; it brought funding, materials, training and its own accountability structure, and proposed only to add value to the existing system rather than replace schools or teachers.
Sparks: one per thousand schools
Vineet knew top-level buy-in would not trickle down by itself; it had to be cultivated by his field staff, whom he called "Sparks," his HCL word for front-liners. With eventual handover to government in mind, he kept the field presence asset-light: one Spark per district, each distributing kits, training teachers and monitoring implementation in roughly 1,000 schools. That was impossible for one person by design: Sparks were meant to be their district's change-making CEOs, finding inventive ways to recruit officials, teachers and communities to hit their numbers.
Sampark started small with phased releases from 500 schools, staging launch events in each district for press, teachers and community members. Vineet's personal appearance, one official said, showed the commitment was real.
Inventing Sampark Didi
Months after launch, Chhattisgarh praised the math materials and asked for an English program in time for an event three months away. Vineet accepted on the spot. Anupama's team was stunned, since the math program had taken years to refine, but within weeks of iteration they produced a small orange speaker loaded with English lessons narrated by a playful fictional teacher, Sampark Didi (didi means "sister" in Hindi). Inspired by Bollywood, Didi taught through hundreds of stories and songs, and a rechargeable battery let it run in schools without power.
- 500 new English words learned per child.
- 100 new sentences children can form.
- Teachers gain correct pronunciation and the confidence to teach English.
- One play, My Family, performed by pupils in the village square: parents understood little, but hearing their child talk about them in English told them something real was happening at school.
Activating the catalyst in others
Hiring for attitude
Soon after launch Vineet realized he had "made a blunder" with some Sparks. Hires from India's top universities could not cope with areas of extreme poverty without food or plumbing; as Anupama puts it, they had a vision and ideas but would not do the dirty work. The Nayars stopped prioritizing credentials and hired for attitude: people who knew from experience what it was like to sit in those classrooms. They committed to training each Spark personally. One new hire walked three days after landslides cut transport from his village, sat straight down in the training without washing, eating or drinking, and left Vineet wishing, hands folded, that he had such commitment himself.
Training by impossible tasks
Training aimed less at skills than at awakening passion and hunger for self-improvement:
- Values first. New hires linked their personal values to Sampark's purpose and said what they hoped to learn.
- Thrown in. They were put into roles they had never done, pulling all-nighters to prepare presentations on unfamiliar topics.
- Rigorous feedback. Vineet critiqued hard, reminding them that he could only enable, not make them succeed; one Spark remembers a very tough boss who always pushed them to do wonders.
- Free exit. Anyone could opt out at any time; nobody ever did.
The result was cohorts of confident, autonomous self-starters. By setting them up to achieve what they had thought impossible, the Nayars raised the Sparks' expectations of themselves and taught them to do the same for others. Vineet's view: once someone realizes "even I can do this," they start leading; the process is agonizing and needs patience, but afterwards it is magic.
Activating teachers
Sparks decided for themselves how to turn teachers and officials into change agents. Teacher trainings, for many their first public speaking, were the first chance to shift mindsets. Unlike dreary government workshops, they used songs, dance and games so teachers could feel a joyful classroom, and introduced Didi as the teacher's "creative pair." Sarita Devi, a principal in Gorakhpur, agreed: Didi replaces no one, because emotion and culture come from humans; without the teacher, there is nothing.
Follow-up school visits built trust. Sparks were there to monitor, but told teachers their job was to simplify teachers' daily work. If a teacher leapt to abstractions or moved on without checking comprehension, the Spark nudged gently; as Anupama says, you cannot tell a teacher to step aside while you show them how to teach.
Scarcity as a lever. Each school received one Smart Shala kit and one trained teacher, an operational necessity that Sparks turned into a second purpose. Once trust existed they asked teachers for their own ideas for materials and urged them to act on them and draw in colleagues and communities. Spark Sandeep Kumar says teachers had much to say and felt nobody listened; listening to them made them listen in return. Reena Dobhal, a teacher in Uttarakhand, recalls his energetic first visit and demonstration with the children, which inspired her to be more energetic and invent new materials; she went on sharing tool ideas with him because of the trust built.
Activating officials
Sparks worked just as hard to turn local officials into advocates:
- Patience. Getting a meeting could take weeks or months; some days Sparks waited five hours for five minutes.
- Assistants as allies. They used the waiting time to make officials' assistants into thought partners, asking their views and briefing them on Sampark.
- Rehearsal. Many feared officials, so they practiced pitches on each other and managers for hours until they could seize any moment.
- Tangible evidence. They always brought kits, printed monitoring data and third-party assessments, so officials could handle the materials. One official said the data let him target school visits and ask better questions about teachers' needs; another praised Sampark for understanding, unlike past NGOs, that government is the backbone of any education initiative.
- Constant renewal. Election cycles could replace the whole chain of officials at once, and officials rotated yearly or faster; losing a champion could stall a state. Sparks therefore never stopped building relationships and made it best practice to invite every new official on school visits.
A Varanasi official praised Sampark for not being an NGO that takes photos and leaves, but one that implements and celebrates teachers' success. A senior official said faith builds over time: he had not known Sampark, but visiting schools and seeing teachers and children greet the Sparks made him a believer. An Uttarakhand official said that after days spent on files, the Sparks told him what teachers and students needed; it was like learning a new language.
Building momentum by learning and adapting together
A learning place, not a career
Vineet expected everyone to keep improving: Sampark was "a learning place, not a place for a career." HR colleague Priya Pandey says he looked beyond job descriptions and gave capable people seemingly impossible tasks that forced growth. Rather than fight to retain talent, he celebrated departures once someone stopped learning, offering to be their reference and to coach them for interviews, which surprised the Sparks. He called the result a "high-energy, self-run organization" in which even head-office staff were constantly in motion.
Feedback loops and fiery debate
One good product would not keep teachers and officials engaged, so Sampark kept collecting feedback; Vineet warned that every methodology becomes obsolete within a year. Innovation was an iterative dialogue inside and outside the organization, much of it on WhatsApp: Sparks, Sampark's eyes and ears, fed teacher and official feedback into groups that informed the pedagogy, creative and operations teams in Delhi. Ulhas Shah, state head for Maharashtra, puts it simply: what is not communicated from the ground cannot be fixed from the top.
Every product idea faced rigorous debate. The couple argued openly in front of the team, signaling that friction was welcome. Vineet, biased toward speed, is excited by scale, execution and implementation; Anupama is the guardian of quality and empathy, who will not let him move until the details are covered. His conviction: conflict up front makes execution easier.
Working hypotheses and the Sparks' veto
Staff were told to treat every product or decision as a working hypothesis. Vineet's reasoning: launch something as an initiative and people wait for it to fail; launch it as an experiment you will reverse if it goes wrong, and they help shape it and own it. One final bar applied to everything: nothing was implemented without the Sparks' approval.
Sampark Baithak
Sampark extended materials to new subjects and grades and used design thinking to cocreate digital tools. In 2016, as smartphones and broadband reached rural areas, it launched Sampark Baithak, an app with hundreds of hours of cartoon videos bringing Didi to life. Anupama's teams printed QR codes in student workbooks linking to the videos, so children kept learning at home; because they had to borrow parents' phones, whole families were drawn into nightly homework.
Embedding support systems
Who waters the seeds?
More states began requesting meetings, a sign the innovations were noticed. But, as earlier catalyst chapters showed, sustaining momentum is the catalyst's central problem: once seeds are sown, who supplies the water, light and nutrients? The Nayars needed support systems that let stakeholders cocreate without them.
A culture of togetherness
Vineet worried especially about remote Sparks: how could people feel constant validation without sharing a space? Digital tools sustained what he called a "culture of togetherness." In Sampark's WhatsApp groups everyone was urged to share stories, and when Vineet or a state head liked a comment, it was a high for an isolated Spark: recognition and community.
Sparks copied the model. Noticing that teachers in the same community never talked, they put them into WhatsApp groups to discuss problems, swap advice and show classroom innovations. The groups quickly became marketplaces for ideas: in one Haryana chat a teacher posted his handmade Sampark-style Hindi kit and, given the response, began selling it for 650 rupees.
Rewiring monitoring
In new states teachers were again afraid to open the kits. An official explained the history: officials auditing schools used to count library books and check their condition, so teachers hid the books, a mentality very hard to break. Changing teachers required a more enabling, less punitive stance from government. Sampark's three-person technology team built an offline mobile app letting Sparks log monitoring data in under 60 seconds, and a similar app for officials whose prompts acted as guardrails for behavior: they asked only whether materials and pedagogy were being used, never about lost items or performance, and encouraged officials to celebrate inventive use.
Officials who celebrate
Over time teachers voiced problems more freely and officials encouraged innovation. Naveen Jain, Rajasthan's secretary of education, liked and shared teachers' Sampark-inspired posts on Facebook, created a Star Teacher Award, and launched a Teachers Innovation Club: an annual two-day workshop where 150 teachers built classroom tools with Jain and officials from several levels of government. One attendee noted that there were no hierarchies, unlike the usual one-way contact between officials and teachers. For Vineet, officials and teachers learning to cocreate meant the system itself was starting to work differently.
The movement accelerates
Scale by 2019
By the end of 2019 the numbers were these:
- 130 staff.
- 7 million students and 200,000 teachers reached.
- 90,000 public schools across six states.
- 9 more states asking to join; nonprofits seeking advice weekly; even private schools wanting to buy materials.
Anupama says it was getting bigger than they had imagined. An Uttarakhand official saw changes in teachers' vision and pupils' mastery and insisted it was reality, not imagination. New tools spread through WhatsApp, social media and local networks: teachers used matchsticks and marbles to teach math, tracked comprehension systematically and reorganized activities accordingly. Another official said students now in grades seven to ten still remember Didi.
What changed in classrooms and homes
- The teacher's status. Vineet says Didi brought emotion: singing and dancing, love for the teacher who brought the "magic box," and, for a teacher now teaching English for the first time, respect in the community.
- Punctuality. Schools let the first class to arrive have the kit for the day; where everyone used to come two hours late, they now came one hour early.
- Confidence. A principal in Uttarakhand said pupils once neither interested nor confident in English now sang Didi's songs all the way home.
- Learning at home. Children built materials from recycled trash and garlands, read ahead in workbooks at night and asked for upcoming lessons; a teacher said learning had moved from memorizing and forgetting to learning from the heart, with Didi as a role model.
- Parents. Parents attended teacher conferences for the first time, reporting children greeting them in English at home.
- Results. Sampark's external reviewer found academic scores up 32%, and parents moved children from private schools back to government schools.
- Mothers. In Chhattisgarh, illiterate mothers who came to play with their children started watching lessons, the audio box and materials, picking up tips on how to help; the state launched a large "Mothers Orientation" program.
Government ownership
Governments wove Sampark into their capacity-building and accountability systems. One official with 25 years in the department had never seen an education program continuously reviewed by the chief minister. States updated their own pedagogies and materials on Sampark's model, and Sampark began handing over printing of workbooks and progress charts. Vineet saw the movement taking off: everyone talked about education innovation, and the new yardstick was whether a scheme was full scale, frugal and interesting, a "muscle memory" he believed was here to stay.
The tipping point: Sampark TV
Servers crash, loudspeakers sing
When Covid-19 closed India's schools in early 2020, more than 200,000 teachers rushed to the Baithak app and crashed the servers. Vineet, embarrassed, says it took 20 days to fix: each new server crashed as usage rose, with 10,000 to 12,000 teachers joining daily, and everyone was frustrated. Once stable, the app became a lifeline. Teachers posted photos of outdoor classrooms cocreated with villages and broadcast Didi from temple and church loudspeakers. Sampark added podcasts for teachers run over WhatsApp and Zoom, and Vineet arranged with national broadcasters to air Sampark videos on cable TV.
A Netflix for education
Mid-pandemic, Vineet read about Netflix's strategy for reaching millions of Indian subscribers and concluded that content consumption in India had changed dramatically. If Netflix could reach that scale, so could Sampark. A team spent eight months designing a "Netflix model" for education and produced Sampark TV, a small orange box of preloaded content that, like Apple TV, turns any television "smart" but needs no internet. It holds video lessons and activities for all grades and subjects, designed as always to complement teachers.
As schools reopened in 2021, Sampark TV was piloted in 500 schools. Children were ecstatic to see Didi on a big screen, and she led a new kind of assessment, Didi Ke Sawaal ("Didi's Questions"), modeled on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?": multiple-choice questions after each lesson earned the class collective points that unlocked hundreds of extra stories and videos. Children once terrified of tests became eager. Anupama, remembering the first analog kits, says they never imagined such a device.
Vineet divides Sampark's history into before and after Sampark TV. Teachers worked with communities to procure televisions; parents moved children from private to public schools in droves; for the first time in several districts, government schools were oversubscribed. A Gorakhpur teacher recalls parents fearing children would watch YouTube all day, until the school invited them in to see how it worked; now parents attend regular meetings and visit on holidays. A Varanasi official admits smart classrooms had seemed "fancy things" for after running water and sanitation, until the device changed that view.
Best of all, the government got the credit, exactly as intended. A Dehradun teacher phoned officials to thank them, proud to teach in a good institution. Governments began electrifying classrooms at scale, and Vineet, for the first time in his life, faced demand exceeding supply ten to one: states wanted Sampark TV in every class, with more subjects and languages.
Lessons learned: cultivating regenerative ecosystems
Maharashtra, 2024
In early 2024, almost a decade after Punjab, the Nayars sat at the back of a classroom in Maharashtra, one of their newest partner states, as children sang, danced and leapt up to answer questions the teacher relayed with Sampark TV. The local Spark, who had won an award for her work with officials, walked in and the children ran to her calling her "Sampark Didi"; that, she said, is when you know you have done what you set out to do. An official described a cultural shift: children question more, a protective society is changing its ideals, and parents, in villages where most homes lack a TV, are moved to see their children learn from one.
The chain of catalysts
For the authors Sampark captures what catalyst-driven scale means. The Nayars inspired Sparks to become independent catalysts; Sparks activated teachers and officials, who learned to work together in new ways; that chain drew in skeptical colleagues, parents and whole communities to cocreate for their children. If anything deserves the word movement, they say, Sampark does.
- Find the value zone. Locate where value is really created (here, the teacher-child relationship) and aim every product at it.
- Use contagion. Design frugal, joyful products that spread on their own and let others take the credit.
- Activate a chain of catalysts. Develop front-liners who activate teachers and officials, who activate parents and communities.
- Learn and adapt together. Treat decisions as hypotheses, welcome conflict up front, give the field a veto.
- Embed support systems. Build tools, networks, recognition and non-punitive monitoring that let stakeholders cocreate without you.
| Product | Year | Problem it solved | Frugal trick |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smart Shala kit | 2014 | Rote, abstract teaching | Local pictures, one kit per school |
| Sampark Didi speaker | 2014-15 | Teachers unable to teach English | Battery-powered, no electricity needed |
| Sampark Baithak app | 2016 | Learning stopped at the school gate | QR codes in workbooks, parents' phones |
| Monitoring apps | 2010s | Punitive audits, hidden kits | Offline, under 60 seconds, "used?" prompts |
| Sampark TV | 2021 | Covid closures, no internet | Preloaded box turns any TV smart |
Reach and the exit
The Nayars expect to reach 20 million children by 2027, a deadline pushed back two years by the pandemic.
- 15 million children reached of a 20 million goal.
- 500,000 teachers trained.
- 250,000 teaching kits distributed and 53,000 Sampark TVs in classrooms.
- Cost: $1 per child per year.
They are untroubled about Sampark's future. The foundation was never an end in itself but a means to cultivate genius at scale; it is for teachers, governments and communities to cocreate Indian education and carry the movement on long after Sampark is gone.
The 32% score rise comes from Sampark's own commissioned reviewer, not a published randomized evaluation, and "reach" counts children exposed rather than measured learning gains. Sampark's planned self-dissolution was originally set for 2025 and has already slipped. The chapter says Vineet "joined" HCL as CEO in 2007; in fact he had been with HCL since 1985 and was president before becoming CEO in 2007, which matters because the 2005 revenue baseline predates his CEO term. Nearly every voice quoted is a founder, staff member or partner official; teacher workload, failures and states that dropped out go unmentioned.
The Way Forward: Cristina Ventura at White Star Capital
The authors close by restating their verdict: Collective Genius was right that leading innovation means architecting cocreation, but democratizing innovation in-house is only the foundation. Great leaders are also bridgers and catalysts who spur cocreation far beyond their walls, and the three ABC roles together achieve what no single organization can. The throughline of the ABCs is development, of oneself and others, and it begins with self-awareness: knowing your "why."
A provocation, and a paradigm extended
Hill, Tedards and Wild describe the book as a provocation: a demonstration of what is possible, meant to embolden readers to cocreate the future they imagine for their organizations and communities. One question guided the research: how do great leaders drive innovation at scale? They began unsure of the answer. The leaders studied confirmed the core lesson of their earlier book, Collective Genius: leading innovation is not about marshaling followers but about architecting an environment for cocreation (collaboration, experimentation and learning). The new research showed that this shift did not go far enough. In-house democratization is the base; leaders must also forge partnerships and movements.
Wayfinders, not pathfinders
Executives sense the shift
The authors meet many senior executives who admit that a dynamic, complex, interconnected economy defeats old leadership models. Two anonymous examples:
- The industrial CEO. At a town hall of a major industrial multinational, the room went silent when the CEO said he had "no clear vision" for the future and that the company would have to find its future together.
- The automotive CEO. In a letter to European Union citizens, he argued that no company, however well run, can deliver an affordable electric vehicle alone; business, government and NGOs must "work horizontally" toward a prosperous, carbon-neutral future.
Why wayfinding
The open question is who will lead that way. The authors call their subjects wayfinders, leaders who help orient others to where they are and where they want to go.
Pathfinder. Has a destination in mind and blazes a trail for others to follow; the route can be copied step by step.
Wayfinder. Discovers both route and goal along the way and adapts to changing conditions; you cannot follow the footsteps exactly, only learn from them and find your own way.
Wayfinding resists bullet-point summaries. The leaders crossed choppy waters like ancient seafarers who read the sun, stars, currents, clouds and wildlife without instruments. The authors distill four demands:
- Slow down to go further. Accept short-term slowness for long-term speed and reach.
- Clarify purpose. Take time to define what animates you and those working with you.
- Know the context. Use curiosity and diligence to understand your specific circumstances intimately.
- Be tenacious. Do the hard work of marrying bold ambition with grounded reality.
The chapter then turns inward, asking readers how to prepare themselves and others to lead innovation with a view that is realistic yet optimistic, and offers vignettes of one last wayfinder: Cristina Ventura, general partner at tech investor White Star Capital, the first leader the authors met whose formal title was "chief catalyst officer."
Be curious about yourself and others
Woo's question
In 2013, interviewing Ventura, Jennifer Woo, CEO and chair of Lane Crawford Joyce Group (LCJG), asked what her "why" was and what legacy she wanted to leave. Ventura was stunned: across an accomplished career at LVMH, Gucci, Prada and Apple, no leader had asked. She had always reflected on herself, but Woo's genuine, human curiosity brought clarity. Her honest answer was that what had always fired her was catalyzing evolution and growth in others, so they could make their own path to sustainable impact. She knew then that Woo was a leader with whom she could live those values.
The authors generalize: many people climb to formal leadership without examining what drives them, perhaps because nobody ever asked. Yet leading innovation takes courage and often feels like staring into fog; a sense of your why guides you through messy terrain and gives you the confidence to act.
Shared values and a new role
Woo's question opened conversations about individual and shared values:
- Ventura. A Spaniard who had lived in Hong Kong for a decade, she found that Asian values of family and community matched those of her Catalan upbringing; her parents were entrepreneurs.
- Woo. Head of a multigenerational family business, long seen as Asia's premier luxury retail and brand management group, she stressed responsibility, sustainability and a meaningful legacy.
- The shared insight. Both were inspired by how Asian customers were redefining luxury: not flashy goods but personal meaning, an experience, a lifestyle, something that makes you the best version of yourself.
Out of these talks came a brand-new LCJG post, chief catalyst officer, which Woo let Ventura shape around her talents and passions.
The Cage
Ventura launched a corporate accelerator, The Cage, to incubate businesses at the intersection of technology and lifestyle, an increasingly important junction in fashion. It gave founders education, resources and relationships, but its distinctive feature was an onboarding process designed to pass on Woo's gift of clarity and orientation. Ventura built a full curriculum of self-discovery and meditation sessions to help each founder define a purpose and align it with strategy and ambition. Her questions led into explorations of the life experiences that had shaped them, an unorthodox stress on self-awareness and self-management. One young engineer who had simply wanted to start a tech business called the alignment of purpose, values and business life-changing; knowing her why, and having a mentor who knew her deepest aspirations and not just her business model, carried her through a startup's ups and downs.
Ventura chose depth over scale, taking only mission-driven founders committed to tangible change. By 2018 The Cage had graduated three cohorts, and every startup left with funding, commercial agreements with LCJG or other companies, or both. Her motto is "Values create value," and the authors endorse it, urging readers to start a conversation about values and ask: what is your why?
Dare to try
A zigzag career
The Cage was also Ventura's platform for amplifying impact. She poured her experiences and relationships into an ecosystem around its founders, turning it into a generative community of academics, investors and technologists bound by a commitment to impact. That value came from her willingness to leave her comfort zone and reinvent herself across what she called a "global, zigzag career."
| Stage | What she did |
|---|---|
| LVMH, London | UK headquarters of a group of 75+ luxury brands; five promotions in seven years |
| Gucci, Europe to Asia | At 29, managed 1,300 staff in 14 countries |
| Prada Group | Regional retail director; key role in the 2009 IPO |
| Apple (2011-13) | Opened Hong Kong and South China; flagship store (Sept 18, 2011); 1,500-person team |
| LUXARITY | Secondhand luxury pop-up funding social causes; blockchain provenance |
| VenturaXVentures | Own angel fund, Singapore |
| White Star Capital | Chief catalyst officer, then general partner; Singapore, then Abu Dhabi (2024) |
She grew up in a small town outside Barcelona. Moving to continents where she knew no one and did not speak the language was hard, but curiosity about what she might learn and become gave her courage. Arriving in Hong Kong in 2005, she built relationships with anyone she could, from the flower seller on her street to local entrepreneurs and conglomerate executives, treating no interaction as unimportant. The longer she stayed, the more convinced she became that Asia was ahead of the West, especially its young people, in their values-based view of luxury and appetite for technological frontiers.
From fashion to Apple
Across these roles she learned the nuances of luxury brands, corporate cultures and local markets, and how to adapt to new contexts. In 2011 Apple recruited her to open its Asian market in Hong Kong and South China. She swapped designer clothes for T-shirts and jeans, and the jump to technology felt like a new world. But she connected past and present: Apple, like the fashion houses, delivered a holistic luxury experience, only now to the mass consumer. She built a team of mostly high-energy twenty-somethings who were inventive problem-solvers, shuttling between Cupertino and Hong Kong; being from neither the US nor Asia helped, and colleagues saw her as a bridge between East and West, luxury and technology. With her team and headquarters she opened the flagship Hong Kong store on September 18, 2011, and over two years grew a 1,500-person team that contributed to what became Apple's $8.8 billion China market.
LUXARITY and teaching
Combining tech know-how with a passion for sustainability, she launched LUXARITY (luxury plus circularity), a secondhand luxury pop-up store giving all proceeds to social initiatives and grants for design students. She pitched it as a movement, not a shop: friends, socialites and celebrities donated pieces from their wardrobes, and blockchain partners gave each item a digital provenance so buyers could trace its story, tapping young consumers' wish for meaning in luxury.
LUXARITY led to invitations to speak at design and tech schools. A lifelong learner, she had repeatedly spent vacations and bonuses on executive education around the world, and says the people and ideas she met there changed her life. She tried teaching, though she had never pictured herself in front of a class; a fellow instructor noted that she aimed less to teach than to learn alongside students, giving everyone an equal chance to voice an opinion.
Reinvention as energy
Repeatedly she stretched beyond what she thought possible, immersing herself in unfamiliar settings, building authentic relationships and learning from those around her, with her values giving her confidence in frightening moments. Periodic "resetting" became energizing. The twists of her career left her with a unique combination of experiences that generated opportunities she could never have planned, and she channeled them into each new phase.
Ventura's lesson is to seek diverse experiences and accept stretch assignments with courage and humility. The unexpected combination of contexts she carried with her became the source of opportunities nobody could have designed in advance: dare to try, because you cannot know where it leads.
Connect the dots: scale your impact
A superpower for connection
In Hong Kong Ventura was known for one superpower: forging value-adding connections across her network, translating between East and West, luxury and technology, and corporates, startups and academia. Once she connected with an executive, founder or professor on a human level and found shared values, her instinct was to introduce them to people who could help them realize their dreams. She made introductions optimistically but expected nothing in return, spent heavily on dinners and curated gatherings, and started a WhatsApp group, CatalystsXImpact, which grew to 600+ catalysts worldwide sharing ideas, questions and partnerships.
Singapore and VenturaXVentures
During the pandemic she closed her Hong Kong chapter and reinvented herself again in Singapore. Having seen capital's catalytic effect on entrepreneurs and their stakeholders, she imagined scaling her impact through investment: she became an adviser to LCJG and launched her own angel fund, VenturaXVentures, a platform for "sustainable and responsible impact in business." She invested only in founders who shared her values, and gave more than money, activating strategic investors, family offices, institutions, corporates and academics around the fund's mission: connect global talent, catalyze growth and create sustainable value for all stakeholders, the planet included.
White Star Capital
She kept broadening herself through ad hoc projects and advisory boards in government, fashion, philanthropy and academia, and turned down attractive offers, including CEO roles at major Asian and European brands. Instead she joined White Star Capital, the tech investment firm of longtime friend and thought partner Eric Martineau-Fortin, its cofounder and managing partner. Impressed by how she defined herself as an "ecosystem generator," he offered what nobody else had: to be the firm's chief catalyst officer and turn its global partner network into a generative, value-creating ecosystem.
Again she was out of her comfort zone, often the only woman in meetings, among colleagues mostly from investment banking who judged decisions by returns and efficiency. She still found ways to create joint value through genuine connection:
- Singapore launch. Opening White Star's first Singapore office, she hosted launch events introducing the team to government officials, family offices and startups, and kept stressing quality relationships; a peer called her style "old school," well suited to local culture.
- More than capital. She insisted White Star offered Singapore more than money and introduced colleagues to the academic community, which led to the White Star Capital STAR Impact Foundation, aiming to democratize entrepreneurship through scholarships, mentoring and access to a global knowledge network for people of any background or gender.
- MENA expansion. As general partner, she was charged with expanding into the Middle East and North Africa. Frequent trips showed her that Abu Dhabi was innovating at the frontier of technology and sustainability. Believing that once you recognize everyone in a room it is time for a new room, she moved there in 2024, sharing an office with another venture fund whose founder had been a key partner at The Cage.
Asked about her legacy, she says success will be measured by the growth, profitability and societal impact of portfolio companies and the strength of relationships with investors and partners, balancing financial returns with measurable social contribution for long-term value to all stakeholders. The authors' advice to readers: you too have your own experiences, talents and connections, your slice of genius; generosity with ideas and relationships enlarges you and your impact, so make the catalytic connections that open new possibilities for cocreation.
Let your values be your guide
Ventura, like the book's other leaders, kept experimenting and discovering herself while her values stayed fixed as her compass. Her story shows how a genuine gesture ripples outward: Woo's single question let Ventura blossom into a catalyst who, in turn, passed the gift of clarity on through her own curiosity and opened opportunities for others to fulfill their purpose. The authors call these hallmarks of great leadership.
Readers' journeys, they warn, will bring conflicts, missteps and failures. The book's leaders endured much but did not turn cynical; they chose optimism and faith in human potential.
- Be curious about yourself and others. Ask what your "why" is, and ask others theirs.
- Dare to try. Embrace stretch roles, unfamiliar contexts and reinvention.
- Connect the dots. Share ideas and relationships generously, expecting nothing back, to scale impact.
- Let your values be your guide. Values stay fixed while contexts change.
- Abundance. Seeing possibility where others see constraint.
- Curiosity. Genuine interest in others, especially those unlike themselves.
- Generosity. With energy and attention, making sure all stakeholders meet their priorities.
- Tenacity. Relentless pursuit of impact despite repeated obstacles.
From Ajay Banga to Cristina Ventura, these leaders live, scale and sustain their values by making room for others to try the ABCs themselves. The common thread is development of oneself and others. Ventura says leading innovation starts with self-awareness and inner alignment: ask who you are and why you are here, find your slice of genius, and pursue a purpose bold enough to deserve your dedication. With abundance, curiosity, generosity and tenacity, the authors conclude, anyone can catalyze innovation at scale.
Postscript
The authors hope they did justice to leaders who shared their lives for the book. Portraits of top performers usually show heroic solo figures chasing fame and fortune; these leaders defy the stereotype. They are masters of cocreation pursuing ambitions bigger than themselves, scaling their businesses by cultivating deep connections, including with the next generation of talent; those connections are the glue and grease that let them transform themselves, their organizations and the world. When cocreation becomes too taxing, as the authors promise it will, readers may find inspiration in one of the wayfinders: some found their why early, others only after a run of life experiments. Their closing advice: think big, get started, and don't try to go it alone.
The epilogue offers inspiration rather than evidence. Ventura's outcomes (every Cage startup funded, the $8.8 billion China figure) are given without independent measures, and Apple's China revenue reflects far more than one regional team. Apple's first Hong Kong store (IFC Mall) is widely reported to have opened on 24 September 2011, not the 18th. The anonymous CEO anecdotes cannot be checked, and Ventura's story is told largely in her own and admirers' words.
Master Takeaways
The book reduces to one shift: from leader as visionary in front to leader as builder of other people's capacity to cocreate, first inside the organization, then across partnerships, then through whole ecosystems. A catalyst does not impose an agenda but creates the conditions for one to emerge, and succeeds when the movement runs without them.
- Share the driver's seat. Innovation at scale comes from building many people's willingness and ability to collaborate, experiment and learn, not from a visionary issuing directions.
- Lead with all three ABCs. Architect cocreation inside, bridge it across partnerships, catalyze it through ecosystems; one leader may play several roles or delegate some.
- Architects change themselves first. Ku spoke last, Fish asked questions instead of choosing, Suri resisted the surgeon's urge to take charge; culture followed their behavior.
- Trust is the scarce input. Bridgers build mutual trust, influence and commitment; Nwuneli found that missing trust, not money, kept a whole sector fragmented.
- Treat decisions as working hypotheses. People wait for initiatives to fail but help shape experiments, so frame changes as reversible tests and invite revision.
- Develop people, then let them go. Bottura and the Nayars celebrated departures; alumni became the movement's next catalysts in new kitchens, districts and cities.
- Purpose before tools. Every case starts by reframing why the work matters (cash as the real rival, patients first, the 94% who never fly, outcomes not efforts); technology only enables human cocreation.
- Collaboration is not consensus. Diversity of thought and constructive conflict produce better options, but someone still has to decide, and quickly; Ku's tetrads built that decision muscle.
- Fix incentives that punish failure. Banga paid bonuses for well-reasoned failed risks and for killing one's own projects; Fish rebuilt rewards around learning rather than launch counts.
- Ask learning questions. Fish's growth-board script (what did you learn, how do you know, what next, how can I help) replaces pass/fail judgment with discovery.
- Build learning infrastructure, not slogans. CCAD's daily tiered huddles, personal scorecards and emotional-intelligence coaches turned 87 nationalities into teams that spoke up early.
- Hyper-empower in a crisis. In Covid, Suri pushed decisions to the front line and accepted imperfect calls, because a fog rewards fast local learning over central control.
- Labs need landing gear. Delta's Hangar and Mastercard Labs required a core-business sponsor from day one so prototypes had an owner who would scale them.
- Bridgers are social APIs. They connect systems that speak different languages and must be upgraded as those systems change, as Moore tightened Labs to the core after Lyons.
- Curate, translate, integrate. Al Mazrouei chose partners carefully, explained each side to the other, then aligned banks, startups and regulators on shared intentions and ways of working.
- Share decision rights to win commitment. Bridgers gain influence by giving it: sponsors who help pick startups or set criteria own the result.
- Catalysts map, seed and cultivate. Map the terrain and power dynamics, place tangible interventions where cascades are likely, then nurture the tools and relationships that sustain them.
- Set a purpose big enough for everyone. avatarin's "perfect mobility" let museums, surgeons, JAXA and startups each find their own reason to join.
- Frame asks in the listener's language. Fukabori and Kajitani sold one idea as brand-building, talent development or space strategy; Vineet Nayar spoke "the language of votes" to officials.
- Mapping is learning by doing. Nwuneli found the SME "hidden middle" only by running her own agribusiness, and the trust gap only by interviewing 80 founders.
- Borrow trusted intermediaries. Nourishing Africa's digital training drew nobody until faith groups, state governments and women's associations vouched for it.
- Guard the ecosystem's integrity. Nwuneli vetoed a multimillion-dollar data deal, canceled a bribed grant round and stopped handling money; one scandal can undo years of trust.
- Give talent a canvas. Bottura's "Who are you?" plate, the "my trio" stage and Rosval's Al Gatto Verde show that scaling a business follows from scaling talent.
- Turn mistakes into assets. The dropped lemon tart became a signature dish and, by Bottura's account, a third Michelin star; how a leader reacts to error sets the culture.
- Find the value zone. Vineet Nayar located value at the front line and customer at HCL, and at the teacher-child relationship in schools, then aimed everything there.
- Make it easy for the system. Sampark tailored kits to state curricula, ran end-to-end delivery and let governments take the credit, so officials adopted rather than resisted.
- Frugal beats fancy. A battery speaker and an offline TV box reached 15 million children at $1 each, while tablets sat locked in a principal's office.
- Change the audit, change behavior. Sampark's officials' app asked only whether tools were used, ending the fear that kept kits hidden.
- Hire for attitude and stretch people. Sampark's best Sparks knew poor classrooms firsthand and grew through impossible tasks; elite graduates without that grit failed.
- Know your why. Ventura's career turned on being asked her purpose; leaders need it to act with confidence in fog, and asking others is itself a gift.
- Be a wayfinder. Unlike pathfinders, wayfinders discover both route and destination as they go, guided by abundance, curiosity, generosity and tenacity.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| ABCs of leading innovation | Architect inside, bridger at the boundary, catalyst across the ecosystem | Deciding what leadership role an innovation effort needs |
| Cocreation | Collaboration, experimentation and learning together | Diagnosing why a team generates ideas but not results |
| Five leadership tensions | Aspiration/pragmatism, individual/collective, support/confrontation, short/long term, structure/agility | Calibrating your own style during change |
| Grow, Diversify, Build | 50/25/25 split across core, adjacencies, new businesses, on three time horizons | Allocating an innovation portfolio |
| Mastercard Way | Customer focus, urgency, thoughtful risk-taking, decency quotient | Setting behaviors for a cocreating culture |
| Growth operating system | Founders, executive sponsor, growth board as internal VC, metered funding | Running lean experiments inside a large firm |
| Four growth-board questions | What did you learn, how do you know, what next, how can I help | Reviewing experiments without killing them |
| Learning infrastructure | KPI scorecards, tiered daily huddles, EI coaches and norming sessions | Building a speak-up culture across many cultures |
| Bridger's functions | Curate, translate, integrate, on mutual trust, influence and commitment | Making a partnership or lab deliver |
| Bridger's four questions | Partners' priorities, costs we impose, both/and options, shared credit | Checking a partnership's health |
| Eight innovation principles | Ideas from anywhere, open and diverse, fail smart, share, early metrics, dream, timeliness, Labs as stepping stone | Chartering an innovation lab |
| DFV risk test | Prototype desirability, feasibility and viability, not only the technology | Screening new product concepts |
| Catalyst's functions | Map the terrain, seed tangible interventions, cultivate support systems | Launching a cross-organization movement |
| Trust-by-design platform | Vetting, participation duties, no member fee, paid partners, face-to-face meetings | Building a community that must stay credible |
| Seeding canvases | Give talent a stage of its own, then let it go | Spreading culture across new sites |
| Value zone | Find where value is truly created and invert the pyramid to serve it | Choosing where to focus scarce effort |
| Smart Shala | Pedagogy, local kit, teacher training, monitoring | Designing a frugal intervention for a public system |
| Working hypothesis | Launch decisions as reversible experiments | Introducing change under uncertainty |
| Wayfinder's invitations | Be curious, dare to try, connect the dots, let values guide | Planning your own development as a leader |
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Ajay Banga | Mastercard CEO, 2010-2020 | Plays all three ABCs; market value $27bn to ~$335bn, 500m people included |
| Michael Ku | Leader of Pfizer Global Clinical Supply | Architect of collaboration behind the Covid vaccine trial |
| Kathy Fish | P&G chief R&D and innovation officer | Architect of experimentation via GrowthWorks |
| Tom Mihaljevic and Rakesh Suri | Chief of staff, then CEO, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi | Built a learning community; hyper-empowered caregivers in Covid |
| Nicole M. Jones | Founder of Delta's Hangar | Bridger who built mutual trust for biometric boarding |
| Raja Al Mazrouei | Head of DIFC Fintech Hive | Bridger who curated, translated and integrated banks, startups, regulators |
| Garry Lyons and Ken Moore | Successive heads of Mastercard Labs | Bridgers as social APIs, from outpost to core |
| Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani | ANA engineers, avatarin co-CEOs | Catalysts without authority who launched the avatar movement |
| Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli | Founder of AACE, Sahel, AFC; ONE CEO from 2024 | Mapped the trust gap among Africa's food SMEs |
| Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore | Founders of Osteria Francescana, Food for Soul | Seeded chefs and 13 refettorios worldwide |
| Jessica Rosval | Head chef, Casa Maria Luigia and Al Gatto Verde | A seeded chef who became a catalyst (Roots) herself |
| Vineet and Anupama Nayar | Founders of Sampark Foundation | Cultivated a frugal education movement for 15m children |
| Cristina Ventura | Chief catalyst officer, then general partner, White Star Capital | The epilogue's wayfinder |
The evidence is rich but selective: cases were chosen as exemplars and told mostly in the leaders' and their allies' words, so the book shows what success looked like without testing why similar efforts fail. Outcome figures are often self-reported (P&G's growth scores, Sampark's 32% gain from its own reviewer, Food for Soul meal counts, every Cage startup funded) and some numbers or dates slip between and within chapters (the McKim Medal's "nine years," the 60% arable-land figure). The ABCs are a useful vocabulary rather than a validated model; firms that applied them and failed are absent. Several cases end around their launch (avatarin, AFC), before long-run results, and the costs of cocreation (time, conflict, staff burnout) get little attention.
Connect it
- AI programs. Most enterprise AI pilots stall for the reasons Delta and Mastercard faced: no core sponsor, IT fear of opening systems, and labs without landing gear. The Hangar's sponsorship rule and Moore's eight-week funnel transfer directly.
- Enterprise architecture. Lyons's API-first core and the "social API" metaphor make the same point twice: technical interfaces only create value when someone also builds the human interfaces between teams.
- Banking. DIFC's Fintech Hive and Mastercard's inclusion work show incumbents gaining more from curated, non-exclusive ecosystems with regulators and startups than from gatekeeping; Nwuneli's data-deal veto is a reminder that platform data about small firms is a trust asset.
- Change management. Sampark's monitoring app and Fish's four questions show that what leaders measure and ask shapes whether people dare to experiment.
About this book
Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards & Jason Wild, 2026. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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