I gave this talk for the first time to a real audience this week — the COO Forum (cooforum.net), a peer network where second-in-command executives get together to work through the problems that come with running the operational side of a company. It felt like the right first room: these are the people who actually have to live with a leader’s innovation decisions, good or bad.
The talk isn’t a how-to. That’s the whole point of the book, too. I opened by telling them exactly that: I wasn’t there to teach anyone how to innovate. There’s no shortage of frameworks for that already. I was there to talk about the four ways leaders quietly kill innovation before it gets a fair shot — none of which have anything to do with having better ideas.
Four decisions, in short: innovating when the business doesn’t actually need it; thinking like an innovator when the room needs a banker’s discipline instead; taking the wrong lessons from Steve Jobs — the bluntness and the ego, instead of the ownership and the cutting discipline underneath it; and bolting AI onto processes that were never built for it, instead of redesigning the work itself.
Two things stood out in the room. The first was how much the Steve Jobs section landed — specifically the line that authority gets mistaken for vision, and dominance gets mistaken for direction. Someone asked me to scroll back to it. That’s the sentence I’d want every operating leader to sit with.
The second was that AI took over the second half of the conversation. Not the “will it take our jobs” version of that conversation — the much more specific, practical one: how do you build guardrails into an AI-driven workflow, how do you keep judgment in the loop, what actually changes about how a team is structured once AI can generate all the options and a human just has to choose the right one. That’s the conversation I think every operating leader is going to be having for the next several years, whether or not “innovation” is in their title.
Thanks to Paul Herrerias (linkedin.com/in/paulherrerias) for having me — he runs a tight, generous meeting, and it showed in the quality of the questions.
If you’re part of a group that wrestles with these same questions, I’d genuinely love to bring this talk to you.