#48: Why Companies Must Perform Today While Transforming for Tomorrow: Howard Yu Explains

What if the secret to thriving in the age of AI and relentless disruption isn't perfecting what you do today, but knowing what you'll need to do tomorrow? In this episode of World's Greatest Business Thinkers, Nick Hague speaks with Howard Yu, LEGO Professor at IMD Business School, on future readiness, corporate transformation, and business innovation. Drawing on examples from NVIDIA, Intel, Yamaha, Steinway & Sons, Novartis, Walmart, and Grab, Yu explains how adopting leap strategies and scaling new capabilities drive sustainable growth and competitive advantage. The conversation highlights practical approaches to business innovation, organizational reinvention, and sustainable growth, while showing how leaders can stay ahead of disruption and drive long-term business model evolution. What You Will Learn: ● The Three Non-Negotiable Management Principles That Drive Sustainable Growth ● How to Own, Not Outsource, Your Next Leap ● The Transparency-Driven Culture That Turns Failures Into Competitive Advantages. ● Why Your Sales Team Is Your Earliest Warning System ● The "Plus One Skill" Career Strategy for AI-Driven Workplaces ● How AI Amplifies Your Competitive Edge (If You Use Proprietary Data Correctly) ● The Historic Pattern of Leaping Across Centuries ● How to Identify When Your Industry Is About to Jump and Create Disruption

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About Guest: Howard Yu is the LEGO Chair Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD (International Institute for Management Development) in Switzerland, where he leads the Center for Future Readiness. With a background in studying corporate disruption at Harvard Business School and 14+ years of research across 400+ companies in seven industries, Yu has become a leading voice on how organizations sustain competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets. He is the author of "LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied" and the creator of the Future Readiness Indicator, a proprietary measurement tool that identifies leading indicators of corporate resilience before financial performance declines. Quotes: "It's this dual mandate, if you want, that is to perform every quarter, every year, and you transform for tomorrow also at the same time. Average company we've seen, sometimes they do one side, like performance, quarterly earnings. Sometimes, then they swing into transformation, like, you know, reinvent themselves. But what we've seen is the company has stamina, they do both at the same time, and at its core is to focus on scaling up a few." "When something fails, this requires the company to talk about it, to do an after-action review without finger-pointing and blaming. To identify the root cause of our fumble, let's do better next time, codify that lesson,, and share it? This is how you sustain that momentum." "The reality is adapt and learn. It's not persistent. And that little improvement, you compound it, and many, many improvements are empowered by many, many people across the organization. If you're a small company, it doesn't matter. If you're a small team, just five people." "If you're a senior executive, skip level, talk to the front line, you know, the sales guy or the salesperson on the front end to ask some of the leading questions. To what extent do our customers have alternatives? To what extent do you have pricing pressure? Now, from that angle, we could already have a realistic assessment of the extent our core is still healthy."

Keywords: Primary Keywords (Core Themes): future readiness, corporate transformation, business innovation, leap strategy, organizational reinvention, competitive advantage, disruptive innovation, scaling new capabilities, business model evolution, sustainable growth

Secondary Keywords (Related Subtopics): future readiness indicator, perform and transform,