INTERNAL NETWORKS
Proprietary company-specific networks that enable peers to connect, collaborate, learn, and reinforce learning together across silos.
Connectivity among talent within an organization is a necessary condition for successful enterprise-wide initiatives and business effectiveness.
Large organizations still struggle to enable peer-to-peer collaboration across silos, resulting in:
- Siloed and fragmented cultures
- Unnecessary spending on external consultants and training
- Constrained innovation
- Dysfunctional conflict and Disengagement
- Knowledge loss
- Wasted human capital
- Ineffective structures
Our peer-network has been proven effectively to:
Develop a shared learning culture
Connect distributed talent
Enable internal innovation
Accelerate transformation efforts
Three (3) Distinct Advantages of the Outthinker Networks Model
Our model integrates 3 engagement modes and is proven to be:
- Easily integrated into participants’ flow of work
- More efficient (through peer-to-peer learning)
- Recognized by participants and uniquely valuable
We have cultivated a global community of thought-leaders enabling us to deliver:
- The “best of the best” thought leaders… not limited by academic institution, consultancy, or institution
- Curation informed by a deep understanding of thought leaders’ content and style
Our approach diverges from traditional ones in 4 fundamental ways:
- Learning approach directly by participant challenges
- Curation driven by participant needs
- Frequency that builds trust and intimacy
- Adaptive to today’s world of rapid change
Outthinker onboards and continually communicates with each individual participant to ensure curation remains aligned to the most important challenges.
Rapid, small-format sessions in which participants convene to support and experience-share around a specific challenge as they emerge.
In-person and/or vitual events with a capped number of participants to enable conversations with relevant experts.
Formal networking through intentionally designed meetups and strategically relevant 1:1 introductions.
Platform
Conversations and the shared knowledge developed by the network interactions are recorded, packaged, and made available on-demand through a dedicated platform
Our unique Peer-to-Peer is more efficient and integrates into the Flow of Work
What participants say:
"A group of supportive peers who are facing (or already solved) the same challenge—there's a big focus on practicality."
"Learning only from people in your department is unlikely to lead to a breakthrough idea or differentiation. Here, I get fresh perspectives of ideas."
"It's like getting McKinsey-level advice from peers you know genuinely have your best interest at heart."
"Keeps me plugged into what is happening right now which keeps me ahead of the curve. I don't need to wait for an outdated best practices report next quarter or year."
Meet some members of our vast Community of Thought-Leaders and Experts
Rita McGrath
Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and longtime professor at Columbia Business School. As one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth, Rita’s work is regularly published in the Harvard Business Review. She is consistently ranked among the Top 10 management thinkers in the world and was ranked #1 for strategy by Thinkers50.
Tendayi Viki
Tendayi Viki is an award winning author and corporate innovation expert. As Associate Partner at Strategyzer, he helps companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. Tendayi is a speaker, workshop facilitator and advisor on innovation to leaders across the globe. He has written three books.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee
Felix Oberholzer-Gee is the Andreas Andresen Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. A member of the faculty since 2003, Professor Oberholzer-Gee received his Masters degree, summa cum laude, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zurich. His first faculty position was at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches competitive strategy in executive education programs such as the Program for Leadership Development, the Senior Executive Program for China, and in a program for media executives titled Effective Strategies for Media Companies. His course Strategies Beyond the Market is a popular elective class for second-year MBA students. Professor Oberholzer-Gee won numerous awards for excellence in teaching, including the Harvard Business School Class of 2006 Faculty Teaching Award for best teacher in the core curriculum, and the 2002 Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award for best teacher in the Wharton MBA program. Prior to his academic career, Professor Oberholzer-Gee served as managing director of Symo Electronics, a Swiss-based process control company.
Peter Fader
Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.
In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta Equity Partners to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”
Rob Wolcott
Wolcott is a Adjunct Professor in Executive Education at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and formerly a visiting professor at the Keio Business School (Japan). Wolcott won Teacher of the Year from Kellogg's EMBA program in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He serves on the Digital Advisory Board of ZF, the German global industrial enterprise; Open Innovation Lab of Norway; and H-Farm, the leading digital innovation ecosystem in Italy. Wolcott is also a managing partner with Clareo, a growth strategy consultancy serving senior executives at global corporations such as Exelon, BHP Billiton, Castrol, Johnson Controls, Owens Corning and others.
Wolcott is a regular contributor to Forbes regarding the impact of technology change on business, leadership and society. His book with Dr. Michael Lippitz, Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation (McGraw-Hill, 2010) shares a decade of research and has been published in Chinese and Japanese. Wolcott's work has appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review, strategy+business, The Harvard Business Review, TheHill.com, Quartz.com, The Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age, Business Week, The Financial Times (European Edition), The New York Times and numerous overseas publications. He is a frequent speaker at events worldwide.
In 2003, Wolcott founded the Kellogg Innovation Network (KIN), a network of senior executives dedicated to driving sustainable innovation, now an independent organization known as The World Innovation Network (TWIN).
Wolcott received a BA, European and Chinese History; and an MS and Ph.D., Industrial Engineering & Management Science, Northwestern University.
Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Disruption Advisors, a world-class leadership development company that helps organizations operationalize a growth mindset in their leaders and teams. Under Johnson’s leadership, Disruption Advisors has been an Inc 5000 fastest growing company, where they leverage Johnson’s powerful S Curve model to give leaders and their people a shared language to create positive change across an organization. Johnson was named a top 200 female founder by Inc Magazine in 2023 and in 2020 she was a Top Voice on LInkedIn where she has 1.8 million followers. A co-founder of the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, and an award-winning stock analyst on Wall Street, she now applies her underst
Michael Tushman
Michael Tushman holds degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.E.E.), Cornell University (M.S.), and the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. (Ph.D.). Tushman was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998 where he was the Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business from 1989 to 1998. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT (1982, 1996) and INSEAD (1995-1998, 2011).
Professor Tushman is internationally recognized for his work on the relations between technological change, executive leadership and organization adaptation. His work centers on the role of senior teams in building organizations that host incremental as well as discontinuous innovation as well as leading those organizational changes associated with innovation streams. His work on ambidextrous organizational designs focuses on organizational and senior team characteristics that enable firms to exploit current capabilities as well explore into new spaces. He is working on the impact of distributed innovation on incumbent firms and the role of organizational identity in shaping a firm’s ability to handle paradoxical strategic requirements.
Tushman teaches courses on leading innovation and organization effectiveness and on leading strategic innovation and change. At Columbia, he won the first W. H. Newman Award for excellence and innovation in the classroom. At Harvard, Tushman is involved in comprehensive and focused executive education programs, the MBA program, as well as its doctoral programs. Tushman is the faculty chair of the Advanced Management Program as well as co-chair of the Management track of the DBA program and co-faculty chair of Leading Change and Organizational Renewal (LCOR). He was previously the faculty chair of the Program for Leadership Development (PLD). He has supervised many doctoral students, several who have won national awards for their dissertation research.
Professor Tushman has served on the boards of many scholarly journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organizational Dynamics, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He has served as chairperson of the Organization and Management Theory and the Technology and Innovation Management Divisions of the Academy of Management. Tushman is a consultant and instructor in corporate executive education programs around the world. Tushman was senior advisor to the Delta Consulting Group and past trustee of IBM Credit Corporation. Tushman is a founding director of Change Logic.
Ram Charan
Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author, and speaker who has spent the past 40 years working with many top companies, CEOs, and boards of our time. Fortune magazine has called him "the most influential consultant alive."
Ram is known for cutting through the complexity of running a business in today's ever-changing environment and providing actionable real-world solutions—the kind of advice you can use Monday morning.
He began his business education early in his life while working in the family shoe shop in northern India. As a young engineer, his bosses recognized his business talent and encouraged him to develop it. He went on to earn MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School, where he graduated with high distinction and was a Baker Scholar.
Ram shares his business insights through writing and teaching. He has written over 30 books that have sold more than 4 million copies in more than a dozen languages. Three were Wall Street Journal bestsellers, and Execution, co-authored with former Honeywell CEO Larry Bossidy, spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
His work with various companies include Toyota, Bank of America, Key Bank, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Group, Novartis, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, UST Global, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo), Humana and Matrix. He has taught many up-and-coming business leaders through in-house executive education programs and coached dozens of leaders who became CEOs. He received several awards for his teaching, is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, and has served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance.
James Stavridis
In June of 2021, James Stavridis assumed the role of Managing Director and Vice Chairman, Global Affairs at the International Private Equity firm, The Carlyle Group. His journey with The Carlyle Group began in the summer of 2018 when he joined to provide guidance on geopolitical and international financial opportunities, collaborate with senior leadership within the firm, and offer specific advice on business prospects in cybersecurity, aerospace, maritime, transportation, and other vital sectors. Additionally, he took on the role of the 14th Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Before his tenure at The Carlyle Group, he served as the Chair of the Board of Counselors at McLarty Global Associates from 2018 to 2021, stepping down to focus on his responsibilities at The Carlyle Group. His previous role from 2013 to 2018 was as the Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, an esteemed institution with a rich history in international relations, celebrating its 80th year of continuous operation that fall. During his five-year tenure, he held the position of the 12th Dean in the school's history and cherished the experiences gained there.
For a six-year period until 2019, he held the position of Chair of the Board of the US Naval Institute, the premier professional organization encompassing the sea services, including the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine. He continues to serve as Chairman Emeritus, overseeing the operations of the organization, with its flagship publication, "Proceedings," recognized as the world's leading maritime journal.
Before embarking on these recent roles, he served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, following a distinguished career as a Navy officer that began upon graduating from Annapolis in 1976. Throughout his journey, he commanded ships at sea and undertook numerous assignments at the Pentagon, specializing in strategic and long-range planning. His PhD in International Relations, earned from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, has proven invaluable in comprehending the intricate landscape of global security.
Robbie Kellman Baxter
Robbie Kellman Baxter helps companies leverage subscription pricing, digital communities, and freemium models to build deeper relationships with customers.
Over the past 21 years, she has worked with over 100 organizations in over 20 industries like the National Basketball Association, Hagerty, The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft, and Ingram Micro.
As a keynote speaker, Robbie presented globally at major conferences, association meetings, trade shows and elite universities as well as to private audiences at many of the world’s most well-known companies.
She hosts the podcast, “Subscription Stories”, where she sits down with business leaders to discuss how they’re using subscription pricing and membership models to redefine the biggest industries and generate predictable recurring revenue. She also developed and taught nine video courses for LinkedIn Learning on business topics ranging from innovation to customer success and membership.
Robbie’s first book, “The Membership Economy: Find Your Superusers, Master the Forever Transaction & Build Recurring Revenue”, anticipated and defined the massive transformation from ownership to membership and the rise of subscription pricing. It was named a top 10 marketing book of all time by BookAuthority.
Her second book, “The Forever Transaction”, takes readers through every step of the subscription business process – from initial start-up or testing of a new model to scaling the operation for long-term growth and sustainability.
Prior to launching Peninsula Strategies, Robbie was a strategy consultant at Booz-Allen & Hamilton, a New York City Urban Fellow, and a Silicon Valley product marketer. She received her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and graduated with honors from Harvard College.
Linda Hill
Linda Hill is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership. She is the co-author of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, co-founder of Paradox Strategies, and co-creator of the re:Route assessment. She was named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten management thinkers in the world in 2013 and received the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2015.
Hill’s consulting and executive education activities focus on leading change and innovation, developing innovation ecosystems, the role of boards in governing innovation, talent development and implementing global strategies. Organizations with which Linda has worked include AIDA, General Electric, RELX, Accenture, UnitedHealth Group, IBM, MasterCard, Mitsubishi, Morgan Stanley, National Bank of Kuwait, AREVA, The Economist, Salesforce.com, and The World Economic Forum.
Faith Popcorn
Faith Popcorn is The original Futurist to the Fortune 500 and deemed The Nostradamus of Marketing by Fortune Magazine.
Her Company, Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve, provides consulting services, specifically strategic foresight, positioning, innovation strategies for clients such as Allergan, Bayer AG, Canopy Growth, Chipolte, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Constellation Brands, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Unilever and USPS, among others.
Along with writing the international best-seller The Popcorn Report, as well as Clicking, EVEolution and Dictionary of the Future, Faith has given her FutureView Speech and workshops globally.
Predicting massive cultural changes like Covid Cocooning, Icon Toppling, Vigilante Consumer and SOS, Faith advises businesses on how to thrive as these seismic shifts take effect.
Vijay Govindarajan
Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and is a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley incubator Mach 49. He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. He is a NYT and WSJ Best Selling Author. His most recent best seller is Three Box Solution. His Harvard Business Review articles “Engineering Reverse Innovations” and “Stop the Innovation Wars” won the prestigious McKinsey Awards for best article published in HBR. His HBR articles “How GE Is Disrupting Itself” and “The CEO’s Role in Business Model Reinvention” are HBR all-time top 50 bestsellers. VG was named by Thinkers 50 as a Top 3 Management Thinker in the world and received the Breakthrough Innovation Award in 2011. VG was inducted into Thinkers 50 Management Thinkers Hall of Fame and was given the Distinguished Achievement Award for most contributions to the understanding of innovation in 2019. VG is the only recipient of Distinguished Achievement Awards in two different categories from Thinkers 50. VG has worked with CEOs and top management teams in over 40% of the Fortune 500 companies to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. He has been a keynote speaker in the BusinessWeek CEO Forum, HSM World Business Forum, TED, and World Economic Forum at Davos.
Hubert Joly
Hubert Joly is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Best Buy.
He is also a member of the board of directors of Johnson & Johnson and Ralph Lauren Corporation, a member of the International Advisory Board of HEC Paris, and a Trustee of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and of the New York Public Library.
Joly has been recognized as one of the top 100 CEOs in the world by the Harvard Business Review, one of the top 30 CEOs in the world by Barron’s, one of the top 10 CEOs in the U.S. by Glassdoor, and one of the top 50 Management Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.
He is the author of the best-selling book “The Heart of Business – Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism.”
Tom Davenport
Tom Davenport is a world-renowned thought leader and author, is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and an independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics.
An author and co-author of 20 books and more than 200 articles, he helps organizations to transform their management practices in digital business domains such as artificial intelligence, analytics, information and knowledge management, process management, and enterprise systems.
He's been named:
A "Top Ten Voice in Tech" on LinkedIn in 2018
The #1 voice on LinkedIn among the "Top Ten Voices in Education 2016"
One of the top 50 business school professors in the world in 2012 by Fortune magazine
One of the 100 most influential people in the technology industry in 2007 by Ziff-Davis
The third most important business/technology analyst in the world in 2005 by Optimize magazine
One of the top 25 consultants in the world in 2003
Hermann Simon
Hermann Simon is the Founder and Honorary Chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners. He is an expert in strategy, marketing and pricing. He is the only German in the “Thinkers50 Hall of Fame” of the most important management thinkers in the world. In German-speaking countries he has been continuously voted the most influential living management thinker since 2005. The magazine Cicero ranks him in the top 100 of the 500 most important intellectuals.
Before committing himself entirely to management consulting, Simon was a professor of business administration and marketing at the Universities of Mainz (1989-1995) and Bielefeld (1979-1989). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Stanford, London Business School, INSEAD, Keio University in Tokyo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1995 to 2009 he was CEO of Simon-Kucher & Partners.
Professor Simon has published over 35 books in 27 languages, including the worldwide bestsellers Hidden Champions (Boston 1996, cover story of BusinessWeek in 2004) and Power Pricing (New York 1997), as well as Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share (Boston 2006). Hidden Champions of the 21st Century, Success Strategies of Unknown World Market Leaders (New York 2009) investigates the strategies of little known market leaders. Confessions of the Pricing Man was published by Springer, New York in 2015. His textbook Price Management (2019), his autobiography Many Worlds, One Life: A Remarkable Journey from Farmhouse to Global Stage (2021), and True Profit! No Company Ever Went Broke from Turning a Profit (2021) were all published with Springer, New York. New this year are Hidden Champions in the Chinese Century: Ascent and Transformation and Beating Inflation, again with Springer, New York.
Simon was and is a member of the editorial boards of numerous business journals, including the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Management Science, Recherche et Applications en Marketing, Décisions Marketing, European Management Journal as well as several German journals. For several decades he regularly wrote columns for the German business monthly Manager Magazin. As a board member of numerous foundations and corporations, Professor Simon has gained substantial experience in corporate governance. From 1984 to 1986 he was the president of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC). Simon is co-founder of the first Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) listed on the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt, and the first search fund in Germany.
A native of Germany, he studied economics and business administration at the universities of Bonn and Cologne. He received his diploma (1973) and his doctorate (1976) from the University of Bonn. Simon has received numerous international awards and holds honorary doctorates from IEDC Business School of Bled (Slovenia), from the University of Siegen (Germany) and from Kozminski University Warsaw (Poland). He is a honorary professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. In China, the “Hermann Simon Business School” is named after him.
Linda Yate
Linda is a seasoned CEO with over 25 years of experience creating global strategy and driving innovation. As a native of the Silicon Valley, with an extensive network, she has served as a bridge between Silicon Valley and the Global 1000 her entire career.
She launched Mach49 as the only Silicon Valley incubator/accelerator focused exclusively on helping G1000 companies Disrupt InsideOut — creating, building and launching new ventures generated from within their organizations and Disrupt OutsideIn — designing and operating world-class corporate venture groups. In addition to creating new ventures, Mach49 builds client capability and infrastructure to create a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures in perpetuity and to manage the mothership so it understands the from-to shifts required to ensure new ventures can reach escape velocity.
Linda spent a decade as a member of the Board of Directors for NYSE-traded Sybase Inc. (now SAP) and has been an advisor to many private companies.
Linda was CEO of Strategos – a leading international strategy consulting firm she co-founded with business guru Gary Hamel, helping G1000 clients innovate by “Bringing the Silicon Valley Inside.” Prior to Strategos, she spent 6 years with the Mac Group/ Gemini where she headed the San Francisco office, co-headed the High Tech practice there and, later, Europe (based in Amsterdam). She spent 2 years at Smith Barney in corporate finance and M&A and has extensive global experience having worked in / traveled to over 60 countries.
She is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute; an environmental activist having built Tah.Mah.Lah (http://www.tahmahlah.com), considered the greenest home in the US; and a 21st-century education pioneer, working to transform public schools and co-founding Creekside Learning Lab.
She holds a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and a MA in International Relations and Comparative Politics from Stanford University where she guest lectures.
Julia Boorstin
Julia is CNBC's Senior Media & Technology Reporter, covering all things content, distribution, and advertising related. She reports on the media giants and the disruptive force of digital distribution, as well as the rise of streaming. When it comes to Facebook and other social platforms, she focuses on their impact on politics and society, along with the role of growing regulatory oversight.
Additionally, she takes the helm of CNBC's Disruptor 50 coverage, responsible for creating an annual list of the most innovative, fast-growing private companies. She also contributes to CNBC's #ClosingtheGap coverage, which highlights companies and individuals working to close gender and diversity gaps.
Her book, "WHEN WOMEN LEAD: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them," was published on October 11, 2022, by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. In the book, she shares groundbreaking and deeply reported narrative work, conducting interviews with thousands of female executives. This work reveals the counterintuitive, against-all-odds approaches of women running the world's most innovative (and successful) companies—and what we can learn from them.
Formerly a resident of New York, she now resides in LA with her husband and two kids.
Closer to need
Higher ROI
More Adaptive
Greater Collaboration
- 70% of society’s most transformative innovations have come from intrapreneurs working inside large established organizations, not entrepreneurs.
- Companies that treat employees as intrapreneurs are 3X more likely to be in the top quintile of financial performance.
- Those companies enjoy a 2.5X advantage in their ability to recruit and retain top talent.
