New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Vijay Govindarajan — VG — about why the next breakthrough American innovation may be discovered in a village in India before it ever reaches Silicon Valley. Fifteen years after introducing the world to reverse innovation, VG returns with a new book co-written with MIT mechanical engineer Amos Winter, Global by Design, and a sharper argument: the strategy is only half the story. Someone still has to engineer the $400 ECG machine that replaces the $20,000 one.

VG walks through what he calls problem merit — the discipline of finding a problem worth solving before anyone is allowed to propose a solution — and why most innovation teams fail at exactly this step. He explains why you should never define a problem in terms of its solution, why "raid the parts bin" beats reinventing from scratch, and why the affordability crisis now dominating American politics may already have its answer sitting in a market that had no choice but to solve it cheaply first.

The conversation covers:

• Why innovation never actually fails — and what does: design requirements nobody took the time to define
• What six months of watching people shave in the dark gave Gillette — a two-cent blade, after the $7 Mach3 reached only 1% of Indiae
• How Uber, the iPhone and the $400 ECG were built largely from technology that already existed, and why you innovate only for the part nobody has solved yet
• Where the answer to America's affordability crisis may already be sitting — and why it isn't about importing the product, but bringing back the core value and making it here

Additional Resources:
Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform (Amos Winter & Vijay Govindarajan)
VG at Tuck: https://tuck.dartmouth.edu/faculty/faculty-directory/vijay-govindarajan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vg-govindarajan/

Thank you again 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.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Philipp Muelbert about the three loops every company falls into when their talent needs shift — and why the cheapest-looking option on paper is usually the most expensive one in practice. During the conversation they unpack why AI has become a convenient excuse for restructuring decisions that were coming anyway, and why almost no organisation has a head of redeployment or a budget for one.

Philipp Muelbert reflects on the hidden cultural costs of the "churn loop" — the survivor syndrome that hits the employees left behind, the institutional knowledge that walks out the door, and why new-hire retention is often harder than companies expect. He makes the financial case for redeployment over rehiring, and explains why building an alumni network of well-treated former employees can become a genuine strategic asset.

The conversation covers:

• The three loops companies fall into when talent needs change: churn, exit well, or redeploy
• 75% look for a like-for-like role after layoff, but 60% end up in a full career pivot
• Redeployment saves $140,000 per person, yet no single function owns the process

Additional Resources:
LHH: lhh.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippmuelbert

Thank you again 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.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast

David Fubini spent 34 years at McKinsey & Company, where he was a Senior Partner, Managing Director of the Boston office, and co-founder of the firm's Worldwide Merger Integration Practice — leading dozens of the world's largest M&A transactions. He's now a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he co-leads the Mergers & Acquisitions and Leading Professional Services Firm programmes. He's the author of Post-Merger Integration: Building the Mindset, Skills, and Discipline Needed for Deal Success (Wiley, 2026), co-written with Patrick Sanguineti, and the earlier Hidden Truths: What Leaders Need to Hear but Are Rarely Told.

Most leaders obsess over closing the deal — the strategy, the financing, the negotiation. But according to David, that's not where deals break down. They fail in the messy weeks and months after the ink is dry, when two organisations, two cultures and two workforces actually have to become one. Hundreds of billions in promised synergies are lost every year to integration that was treated as an afterthought rather than the engine of the whole transaction.

In this episode, we dig into why so many companies under-resource the integration effort, why your most capable people — not your spare capacity — should be running it, and why David deliberately refuses to hand leaders a step-by-step playbook.

In this episode we cover:

Why the Integration Management Office is the real engine of a deal — and why companies staff it wrong
The one question — "Why are you actually doing this deal?" — that should govern every integration decision
How American Airlines and US Airways turned a hostile takeover into a functioning merger
Why decision velocity matters more than perfect information when two companies combine
Where AI genuinely helps integration — and the one thing it will never do: read the room

Additional resources:

Post-Merger Integration: hhttps://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=69100
David Fubini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-fubini-b0009bb/
David Fubini, HBS faculty: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=102821

Thank you to our guest, David Fubini.

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.

Follow us at outthinker.com/podcast