Scott Anthony

 About

  • Scott Anthony talks about companies can outperform the competition by focusing on innovation.
  • Audiences leave with a new appreciation for how innovation can shape their ability to grow their business and build their future.
  • Scott Anthony a senior partner at Innosight, a contributor to Harvard Business Review, author and distinguished keynote speaker.
  • Past clients include: Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Singtel, Kraft, General Electric, LG and Cisco Systems.

About Scott Anthony - Leading Thinker on Innovation & Strategy:

Scott D. Anthony is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a Senior Advisor and Managing Partner Emeritus at Innosight, a growth strategy consultancy founded by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. At Tuck, he teaches the popular elective courses “Leading Disruptive Change,” “Horizon Scanning,” and “AI and Consultative Decision-Making.” His research focuses on the adaptive challenges of disruptive change. At Innosight, he helps CEOs of global organizations design new growth strategies, build innovation capabilities, and manage strategic transformation.
Scott’s next book—his ninth—is slated to be published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2025. The book’s provisional title is Anomalies Wanted: A Brief History of Disruption. His previous books include Dual Transformation, Eat, Sleep, Innovate, The Little Black Book of Innovation, and Seeing What’s Next. He has thrice been named one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 and has earned three nominations for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, winning the award in 2017.
Scott received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, and an Executive Master in Change from INSEAD, where he graduated with distinction.

Read more

 Topics

What Scott Anthony talks about:

Leading Through the Fog: Thriving in Constant Disruption
In today’s fast-moving world, disruption is the only constant. Industry lines are blurring, technology is advancing exponentially, and leaders are expected to navigate a sea of conflicting demands—from sustainability to profitability; empowerment to decisive leadership. To succeed, leaders must learn to see through the fog of uncertainty and create organizational resilience that thrives on change.

“Leading Through the Fog: Thriving in Constant Disruption” is a compelling keynote that equips leaders with actionable strategies to turn today’s ambiguity into tomorrow’s competitive edge. Scott Anthony, a world-renowned expert in navigating disruptive change, draws on more than 25 years of experience working with top executives across industries. He uniquely blends cutting-edge academic research, practical fieldwork, and firsthand experience to provide clear, immediately applicable insights.

In this session, Scott will explore:

  • Amplifying weak signals to spot and respond to emerging trends before competitors.
  • Breaking down hidden barriers that prevent organizational agility and transformation.
  • Fostering a culture of curiosity and collaboration to continuously experiment and adapt in the face of uncertainty.

With thought-provoking examples and practical tools, Scott will challenge conventional thinking and inspire your leadership team to embrace disruption, unlock hidden potential, and lead with confidence through the fog of unpredictability.

Tangible Outcomes | Materials will be customized to deliver against the desired subset of the following outcomes:

  • Identify the most pressing disruptive threats—and opportunities
  • Align a team around an uncertain path forward
  • Constructively deal with conflicting viewpoints
  • Make decisions with incomplete data
  • Role model unfamiliar and uncomfortable behaviors
  • Build an environment of psychological safety that encourages learning and development
  • Identify and encourage “good failures”
  • Surface and disarm “ghosts” inhibiting your ability to change
  • Use purposeful play to build new skills
  • Build a paradox mindset that turns “either/ors” into “both/ands”

 

Strategy through Uncertainty: How to Turn Ambiguity into Opportunity
Disruptive change is accelerating, and companies today face more ambiguity than ever before. But with ambiguity comes opportunity. Business leaders equipped to act in the face of uncertainty can build paths to growth that have not yet been imagined. They can own the future, instead of being disrupted by it.

New technologies, unexpected competitors, and fast-shifting customer tastes are upending established market leaders at an increasing rate. Business models that worked reliably for decades are struggling to deliver growth. Your customers today may not be your customers tomorrow. Traditional approaches to strategy and growth are insufficient. They analyze the past to predict the future. They are facing the wrong way.

In this interactive discussion, Innosight Managing Partner Scott Anthony will present a toolkit he and his colleagues have built to align around a shared vision of the future and then create the organizational momentum to get there. Specifically, he will describe how to live five “new rules of strategy”:

• Live present forward, but work future back
• Explore scenarios, but take a stand
• Accept rough answers, but demand precise assumptions
• Shift from data-drive decisions to data-informed dialogues
• Experiment, experiment, experiment

Break the Cycle of Misalignment And Unite Your Team
When leadership teams embark on ambitious new efforts – new growth initiatives, digital transformation, culture change programs – creating a shared vision of and understanding about the path forward is critical to success. Yet too often, teams that appear aligned are plagued by divisions and doubts just below the surface. This lack of unity can create paralysis, confusion, and derail even the most promising initiatives.

The problem is a human one – and it is solvable. Scott Anthony describes a programmatic approach to achieving leadership alignment that has enabled organizations to align on and successfully launch long-term growth strategies and major new innovation initiatives. Drawing on thinking from neuroscience and behavioral psychology, Scott describes how structured dialogues, visualization, and interactive exercises that get people out of their chairs and moving, can enable teams to break through classic behavioral traps, surface hidden agendas and unite around a strategy for the future.

The Fourth Era of Innovation: How Corporate Catalysts Are Helping Large Organizations Win the Raceto the Future
There has never been more hype around startups. Indeed, so-called “unicorns” like Uber, Airbnb, Ofo and Sea are transforming markets all around the globe. Yet, a paradox is emerging. While it has never been easier to start a company, it’s getting harder than ever to scale one. A handful of big companies, such as Medtronic, Baxter, Syngenta, Unilever, Tata, Singtel and Ayala are demonstrating how to combine assets of scale and entrepreneurial energy to unleash massive impact. An emerging role that enables this kind of success is the corporate catalyst, a mission-driven leader who brings together corporate resources to help solve big global challenges. Catalysts help to navigate their organizations through today’s disruptive environment while
focusing resources on innovation-led growth.

The Myths and Realities of Building a Culture of Innovation
It sounds so seductive – a “culture of innovation.” The three words immediately conjure up images of innovation savants like 3M, Pixar, Apple, and Google.
The sorts of places where innovation isn’t an unnatural act, but part of the very fabric of an organization. It seems a panacea to many companies that struggle with innovation. But what exactly is a culture of innovation, and how does an organization build it? In this interactive discussion, Innosight Managing Partner Scott Anthony will describe the essential elements of a culture where innovation happens naturally and regularly. He will provide practical tips to help you identify and address the barriers facing your organization. And, most critically, he will describe how to start the journey to create such a culture. Specific discussion topics:

• An overview of the four intertwined systems that underpin a culture of innovation
• Simple diagnostic instruments to assess your organization’s innovation capacity
• Tips to identify, motivate, and develop innovation talent inside your organization
• Guidance for how to manage the leadership tensions between operational excellence and innovation

Tips and Tricks from the Trenches of Innovation
Innovation is changing the way that we live, work, play and communicate. In the last few years it has gone from a fringe topic to the shortlist of every organization’s must-do list. Yet, innovation success seems fleeting and unpredictable. Most people believe that only a select few – like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, and Tony Fernandes – have what it takes to innovate. But innovation isn’t magical. It isn’t a mystery. And it isn’t a black art. It is a discipline. And like all disciplines, it can be mastered through careful practice.

In this interactive discussion, Innosight Managing Partner Scott Anthony will share key lessons from more than 15 years of experience in the trenches of innovation. He will integrate his experience as an advisor to global giants, an investor in startup companies, and an entrepreneur building his own company and share practical tips that will allow anyone to improve their ability to succeed with innovation.

Speeding Through Innovation’s First Mile
Innovation appears to be an irrational act. After all, most ideas fail to achieve any kind of commercial success. 50 percent of new businesses fail in their first four years. 75 percent of companies that receive venture capital investment never return any capital to their investments. Most corporations have innovation success rates ranging from 10 to 20 percent. It’s natural to think that these poor success rates result from the failure to generate good ideas. However, what distinguishes success from failure isn’t the quality of the initial idea. It is the process by which an idea gets translated into impact. Based on its unique experience advising some of the world’s most innovative companies and investing in and incubating startup businesses in the U.S., Singapore, India, China, and Indonesia, Innosight has developed a toolkit to de-risk new ideas, and a set of underlying systems that can enable any company to speed through innovation’s first mile.

Specific discussion topics:
• A practical process to manage strategic uncertainty
• How to zero in on the key risks that can derail early-stage ideas
• Best practices in designing, managing, measuring, and interpreting market-facing experiments
• How to build a corporate culture that supports experimentation
• How to address the leadership challenges at innovation’s first mile

Read more

 Recent Publications

 View Similar Speakers

For more information about this speaker:

Call toll-free on 1-866-727-7555
Or, email your request.

Book Now