Interview with Strategy Expert & Bestselling Author, Kaihan Krippendorff

I sat down with Kai­han Krip­pen­dorff, some­one I’ve trad­ed ideas with for years on strat­e­gy and growth.

Kai­han spent his ear­ly career at McK­in­sey, then walked away at 29 to write his first book because he believed there was a bet­ter way to think about strat­e­gy than what most com­pa­nies were doing. Since then he’s writ­ten six books, includ­ing Out­think the Com­pe­ti­tion and his newest, Prox­im­i­ty. Thinkers50 and Glob­al Gurus have both named him one of the top 20 man­age­ment thinkers in the world, and he runs Out­thinker, a glob­al think tank where chief strat­e­gy offi­cers work through their hard­est prob­lems. His frame­works have helped gen­er­ate more than 3 bil­lion dol­lars in new annu­al recur­ring rev­enue for the com­pa­nies he’s worked with.

His core idea is sim­ple and a lit­tle uncom­fort­able: most com­pa­nies don’t lose because they’re out­worked, they lose because they’re out­thought. The options were on the table the whole time. They just could­n’t see them.

In this con­ver­sa­tion, we get into what he calls the fourth option, the dis­rup­tive move that seems impos­si­ble until some­one sits with it long enough to make it pos­si­ble. We talk about why com­peti­tors copy your easy wins but won’t touch your hard ones, the real sto­ry behind cre­ative pric­ing mod­els like Net­flix and Enter­prise, and his new con­cept of prox­im­i­ty, the idea that val­ue keeps get­ting cre­at­ed clos­er and clos­er to the moment a cus­tomer actu­al­ly needs it. We also get into where AI is open­ing real strate­gic oppor­tu­ni­ty ver­sus where it’s just a distraction.

Here are some high­lights cap­tured in clips:

10-Year Strate­gic Thinking

From Con­fu­sion to Confidence

Prox­im­i­ty as a New Busi­ness Strategy

AI as Creation

Dis­rup­tive Innovation

Or watch the full inter­view here:

Addi­tion­al Resources Relat­ed to Kaihan’s Story:

• The Move You’re Not Seeing