You Don't Get Innovation For Free (w/ Gary Pisano)

Explicit content warning

06/17/19 • 64 min

Today, we kick off Innovation Week! Chris sits down with Gary Pisano, professor at Harvard Business School, and author of over 100 scholarly articles on innovation and business management. His most recent book, Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation is a look at how large enterprises can leverage their scale to become transformational innovators.

Chris also talks about pitching consulting services (it’s hard, and he doesn’t like it), how innovation can take a lot of forms that we don’t notice, and how one company is finally reckoning with its terrible past.
Read more of Professor Pisano’s scholarly work (referenced in the interview):

Dynamic Capabilities (1997), Restoring American Competitiveness (2009), Innovation Strategy (2015), Hard Truths (2019)

Buy a copy of Creative Construction here.

The Ten Types of Innovation can be found here.

From the NY Times: Nazis Killed her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One

Follow us on social media! You can find A Case of the Mondays on Facebook, Instagram (@mondaypod), Twitter (@mondaypod1), and LinkedIn.

More about Professor Pisano:

Gary Pisano is the Harry Figgie Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School where he currently serves as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development (promotions and tenure). He joined the Harvard faculty in 1988 after completing a Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley.

Over the course of his career, Pisano has explored fundamental questions about how organizations innovate, learn, compete, and grow. His research and consulting experience has spanned a broad range of industries including aerospace, automobiles, apparel, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, entertainment, financial services, health care, restaurants, semiconductors, software, specialty chemicals, and web services.

At Harvard, Pisano has taught MBA, executive, and doctoral courses, and has mentored a number of doctoral students. He has created and currently teaches a new MBA electric course “Managing Growth” based on his current research on the drivers and impediments to organizational scaling and growth. He is also the co-creator and co-chair of a new executive program called “Driving Profitable Growth”.

In addition to his academic research and teaching, Pisano serves as an advisor to senior leaders at leading companies around the world and has been a director of both public and private company boards. He currently serves on the board of directors of Axcella Health and Celixir.

Writer, Host: Chris Thierfelder
Producers: Sarah and Max Warman
Art: Jennie Jacobs
Music: Kevin MacLeod
IG: @mondaypod
LinkedIn: A Case of the Mondays
Site: A Case of the Mondays
Copyright 2023 TWC Media Group All Rights Reserved

Dynamic Capabilities (1997), Restoring American Competitiveness (2009), Innovation Strategy (2015), Hard Truths (2019)

Buy a copy of Creative Construction here.

The Ten Types of Innovation can be found here.

From the NY Times: Nazis Killed her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One

Follow us on social media! You can find A Case of the Mondays on Facebook, Instagram (@mondaypod), Twitter (@mondaypod1), and LinkedIn.

More about Professor Pisano:

Previous Episode

People WANT to believe (w/ Bethany McLean)

On today's show, Chris sits down with Bethany McLean for a wide-ranging interview, spanning growing up on the Iron Range in Minnesota, to her career as a business writer and how her time in the heady days of business magazines built her skepticism of the corporate world, and led her to be one of the premier chroniclers of corporate malfeasance.
Then, we hear Just One Thing about a company who's helping their employees achieve that ever-elusive work-life balance.
Chris also talks villains, both on the screen and in the boardroom.
Read Bethany at Vanity Fair, watch her on CNBC, or go buy her books.
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She is also a columnist at Yahoo Finance and a contributor to CNBC. Her two books are the The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron and All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. She lives in Chicago. She has also written two mini books, Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the US Mortgage Giants and Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World.

Next Episode

People are Not Disposable (w/ Sebastian Buck)

This week, Chris sits down with Sebastian Buck, Founder and CEO of the Creative Impact agency, Enso. They talk about values and meaning at work, how to measure the impact of corporate values, and how Enso helps companies understand and live their own values and make them relevant to their customers and team members.
Chris also reminisces about 1999 and how far corporate values have come since then.
References:
Follow Sebastian on Twitter, and check out his photography here. Read his work on Medium, and Fast Company.
Check out Enso.
Read Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.
What? You haven't read No Logo by Naomi Klein yet? For shame.
And learn more about the Gilet Jaunes here.
Sebastian Buck is a co-founder of enso, a creative impact agency. He oversees strategic development across all initiatives, including work with Google, Uber, Mattel, Khan Academy, The Nature Conservancy, OfferUp, Medium and 23andme. Prior to enso, he co-founded GOOD/Corps, where he led work with Pepsi on the Pepsi Refresh Project, with Starbucks on Create Jobs for USA and Vote.Give.Grow and with Google, GE, MasterCard and the Gates Foundation. His background is in strategy development for major companies and new initiatives, including scaling GOOD from a magazine to a media business, launching Disney Mobile in Japan and multiple European countries, and establishing British Telecom's video on demand service in the UK (BT Vision). He writes for Fast Company on the evolution of business and publishes Unurth, a website on street art. He holds a law degree from the University of Warwick, UK, and studied corporate finance at London Business School. [email protected]