470: How to Build an Invincible Company, with Alex Osterwalder

Alex Osterwalder: The Invincible Company

Alex is obsessed with making strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship simple, practical, and applicable. He invented the Business Model Canvas, co-founded Strategyzer.com, and lead authored Business Model Generation which sold a million copies in 30 languages. He’s one of the top-ranked management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.

He is the author of the book, The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World’s Best Business Models*.

In this conversation, Alex and I explore the distinction between exploration and exploitation that invincible organizations must hold in tandem. Alex teaches us the five most common myths of the innovation journey and what leaders can do to compete and stay relevant in a changing world.

Key Points

Myths of the innovation journey:

• Myth 1: The most important part of the innovation and entrepreneurship journey is to find and execute the perfect idea.
• Myth 2: The evidence will show you a clear path forward why you systematically test ideas. The solution will magically emerge if you just test and adapt your idea often enough.
• Myth 3: A small number of big bets will lead to a large return.
• Myth 4: The skills required to explore a new business and to manage an existing one are pretty similar. Business is business.
• Myth 5: Innovation teams are renegades or pirates that are out to disrupt the old business. They need to operate in stealth mode to survive inside a company.

Invincible Companies constantly reinvent who they are and where and how they compete in order to stay relevant and ahead.

Resources Mentioned

• The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World’s Best Business Models* by Alex Osterwalder
• Innovation Project Scorecard: Evidence Trumps Opinion

Related Episodes

• How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, with Mark Barden (episode 207)
• The Way to Nurture New Ideas, with Safi Bahcall (episode 418)
• How to Start Seeing Around Corners, with Rita McGrath (episode 430)

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