Julie Averill is a technology and transformation executive with nearly three decades of experience scaling global businesses. As Global CIO and EVP at Lululemon, she led an eight-year transformation that helped grow the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue and built its award-winning India Technology Hub. She previously served as CIO at REI and held senior technology leadership roles at Nordstrom, where she helped pioneer early omnichannel retail. Today she runs Gold Thread LLC, advising boards, CEOs and CIOs on leadership, culture and decision-making in moments of change. She is the author of Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human — Not Just Artificial — Intelligence.

Imagine starting a new job as global CIO and discovering, on your very first call, that every page of the company website returns nothing but an error — with no monitoring, no alerting, and no one who can even tell you who's responsible for fixing it. That was Julie's welcome to Lululemon, and she argues it turned out to be the making of her career. In an age where every company claims to be "doing AI," Julie makes the case that the winners won't be the ones with the flashiest technology — they'll be the ones with the strongest culture behind it.

In this episode, we dive into why every transformation she's led actually started with a crisis, why she calls culture competitive infrastructure rather than a soft skill, and how to tell real AI progress apart from euphoric hype.

In this episode we cover:

- Why every transformation began with a crisis — and how to turn a "burning platform" into a mandate for change
- Why culture is competitive infrastructure, not a soft skill
- What a major-league catcher taught her about reading people and seeing the whole system
- How to separate real AI progress from "euphoric confusion" and headline-driven hype
- Why the best leaders never have to choose between technology and people


Additional resources:

Chief Impact Officer: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Chief-Impact-Officer/Julie-Averill/9798993755380
Julie Averill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieaverill/
Gold Thread LLC: https://goldthreadllc.com/

Thank you to our guest, Julie Averill. Thank you to our executive producer, Zach Ness, our producer, Nazanin Homayoun Jam, and our editor, James Pearce. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

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 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

New on the Outthinkers Podcast, supported by LHH, host Kaihan Krippendorff speaks with Carrol Chang about why the unit of work is shifting from the full-time employee to the task itself — and what that means for every leader rethinking their workforce in the age of AI.
During the conversation they unpack what happens when AI handles all the junior work today, and who develops the senior judgment your organisation will depend on tomorrow.

Carrol Chang reflects on watching two of the biggest shifts in the history of work collide in real time at Andela, why the productivity dividend forces every leader to a strategic fork in the road, and why AI collapsing the cost of talent doesn't eliminate competitive advantage, it just moves it.

The conversation covers:

Why the unit of work is shifting from the full-time employee to the task — and what that means for how you hire, build teams, and plan headcount
The "birthrate problem": if AI absorbs all the junior work today, who develops the judgment and governance your organisation will need in five years?
What remains as your true competitive advantage when AI commoditises both capacity and expertise — and why human judgment, EQ, and relationship-building are the last real moat


Additional Resources:
Andela: andela.com
CodeWars: codewars.com
LHH: lhh.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrolchang

Thank you again to our sponsor, LHH.

Thank you to our guest, Carrol Chang.

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 Eric Ries — author of the landmark The Lean Startup — about his new book Incorruptible, and why the way we've run companies for the last fifty years may be fundamentally corrupt. Not in the dramatic, headline-grabbing sense, but in the older, quieter sense of the word: a slow corrosion of the bonds that make an organisation strong, trusted, and worth building in the first place.

In this conversation they unpack how shareholder primacy — the idea that a company exists only to enrich its investors — took hold without a single vote ever being cast, and what it actually takes to build something that endures. Eric reflects on why this idea is far more recent and far more fragile than we assume, what the most enduring companies in the world have quietly been doing differently, and the practical mechanisms any founder or leader can use to protect a mission from the forces that will inevitably try to erode it.

The conversation covers:

• Why shareholder primacy is a recent invention — and why the "citizens vs tourists" problem in corporate governance changes how you should think about who really owns a company
• What "human flourishing" really means, why mission-driven companies aren't sacrificing financial performance, and how the best operators treat trustworthiness as an asset to bank rather than spend
• The practical defences — mission guardians, multi-entity "constellations," and the paths of ethos and integrity — that leaders can use today to build a governance fortress, no revolution required

Additional Resources:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/

Book: Incorruptible — https://www.incorruptible.co/

LHH: lhh.com

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 Scott Snyder about why most companies are failing to get real value from AI — and why the problem has nothing to do with the technology.

During the conversation they unpack why incumbents keep repeating the same mistakes across every major technology wave, and what it actually takes to move an organisation from experimentation to genuine transformation.

Scott Snyder reflects on the pattern he’s watched play out across mobile, e-commerce, and now AI, why large companies consistently underestimate their own advantages, and how leaders can shift their people from fear and resistance to genuine excitement about working alongside AI.

The conversation covers:

• Why your business strategy has to come before your AI strategy — and how AI should amplify what you already do well, not replace the thinking behind it

• How incumbents can use their hidden advantages — proprietary data, scale, and ecosystem access — to out-innovate startups rather than be disrupted by them

• What it takes to move people through the mindset curve from openness to accountability, and why incentive design is the missing piece most organisations overlook

Additional Resources:

Book: Your AI Life — https://yourai.life/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsnyder5g/
LHH: lhh.com

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

Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva is a globally recognised reinvention strategist, four-time author, and founder of the Reinvention Academy. A former chaired professor at a business school in the Slovenian Alps, she coined the role of Chief Reinvention Officer — unifying strategy, innovation, and change management into a single connected discipline. She has worked with organisations across mining, telecom, financial services, and the public sector, including steering a London-listed mining and metals company through the largest industry crisis in modern history. Her weekly newsletter, Reinvention Weekly, reaches business leaders across the globe.
Most companies know change is accelerating — but they're still operating as if it's temporary. The assumption that things will eventually "go back to normal" is quietly killing organisations that could otherwise survive. A handful of companies have built genuine reinvention capability and are riding waves of disruption ahead of their competitors. Most are still firefighting, waiting for certainty that will never come.
In this episode, we explore why the business model playbook built in the 20th century is dangerously mismatched for today's environment — and what leaders need to think, build, and kill in order to stay viable.
In this episode we cover:

The concept of "metaruption" — why black swan events are now arriving in flocks, and what it means for long-term strategy
Why Reinvention 1.0 (the once-every-40-years big pivot) is no longer sufficient — and what Reinvention 2.0 looks like in practice
The three interlocking disciplines — anticipate, design, and implement — and why most organisations are weakest at the first
Why the shelf life of your decisions is shrinking, and how to build a system that accounts for it
Where to actually start a reinvention journey — including the "kill session" practice that reduces overload before adding anything new

Additional Resources:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nadyazhexembayeva
Reinvention Academy: reinventionacademy.com
Newsletter: Reinvention Weekly — subscribe at reinventionacademy.com

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