Outthinkers #162 — Linda Hill & Jason Wild: The Leadership Model Behind Innovation That Scales
Linda Hill is a Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s leading thinkers on leadership and innovation. Jason Wild is the CEO and founder of WISE (Wild Innovation and Strategy Excellence) and a long-time innovation and strategy leader inside global incumbents. Together (with co-author Emily Tadards), they’ve spent more than a decade studying how established organizations actually turn innovation into something that scales—and distilled the lessons into their new book, Genius at Scale.
The core idea is simple, but uncomfortable: in a world shaped by AI, complexity, and accelerating change, innovation rarely succeeds as a solo act. The winners don’t just build better products—they build better ecosystems, with leaders who can co-create across boundaries (inside the enterprise and far beyond it).
In this conversation, Linda and Jason explain why ecosystems are becoming the true unit of innovation, why culture is an unfair advantage competitors can’t copy, and why the most essential innovation leaders are often the least visible. They walk through their ABC framework—leaders as Architects, Bridgers, and Catalysts—and what breaks when any one of those roles is missing.
If you’re trying to move faster, partner smarter, and scale what works, this episode gives you a practical lens for leading through uncertainty, building the social fabric for innovation, and creating the kind of movement others choose to join.
In this episode we cover:
- Why ecosystems (not firms) are becoming the unit of innovation—and what that changes for leaders
- The ABC framework: Architect, Bridger, Catalyst (and how these roles show up in real organizations)
- Why “culture” is a competitive advantage—and how leaders accidentally undermine it
- The underappreciated “bridger” role—and why org design and incentives often punish it
- Practical starting points: clarity of purpose, surfacing constraints, and creating faster learning loops
Episode timeline:
00:00 — Cold open: why no company can go it alone
00:30 — Sponsor: LHH
02:00 — “If you really know me…” (Linda + Jason)
03:35 — Definitions of strategy (optionality, choices, and adaptability)
08:40 — Why they wrote Genius at Scale
12:30 — Why ecosystems are rising (speed, capability gaps, AI)
17:00 — Can incumbents adopt an ecosystem approach?
22:30 — ABC framework: Architect, Bridger, Catalyst
28:40 — The most underappreciated role: the Bridger
33:30 — Why bridging is a career risk (and how to fix incentives)
41:45 — A practical tool: a “constraints dashboard” + radical transparency
45:30 — Where leaders should start
54:50 — How to keep learning from Linda + Jason
59:20 — Closing + thanks
Additional Resources:
Linda Hill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-hill-hbs/
Jason Wild: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwild/
Book: Genius at Scale — https://geniusatscale.com/
Sponsor: LHH Executive Solutions — https://www.lhh.com
Thank you to our sponsor, LHH
Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.
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