10 Big Ideas for Business Reinvention … Smarter ways to reinvent your strategy, business models, organisation, processes, culture, leadership and performance

April 20, 2025

I was recently described as one of the world’s leading thinker on business reinvention – quite an accolade, I thought – particularly when you look around at some of my peers and their great ideas, books and real-life examples of transforming organisations.

In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, standing still is equivalent to falling behind. Digital disruption, shifting consumer expectations, global crises, and the accelerating pace of technological change demand that organizations continually reinvent themselves.

So which leading thinkers, and recent books about business transformation, turnaround and regeneration, have inspired me?

  • The Ride of a Lifetime:  Bob Iger’s memoir of his time as Disney’s CEO, highlighting leadership, strategic acquisitions, and transformational decisions that positioned Disney for long-term success.
  • Brick by Brick: David Robertson and Bill Breen chronicle Lego’s turnaround from near bankruptcy, focusing on innovation, customer engagement, and aligning culture with core purpose.
  • Innovation Out of Crisis : Shigetaka Komori, former CEO, details Fujifilm’s transformation from a film company to a diversified conglomerate, demonstrating how crises can catalyse innovation and reinvention.
  • See Sooner, Act Faster:  George Day and Paul Schoemaker emphasise vigilant leadership, anticipating threats and opportunities, and developing organizational capabilities to respond proactively to disruption.
  • Resurgent: Julian Birkinshaw and John Fallon explore how incumbent companies navigate disruption, with strategies like fighting back, doubling down, retrenching, or migrating into new markets, using real-world case studies.
  • The New Nature of Business: André Hoffmann and Peter Vanham advocate purpose-driven, sustainable business strategies, integrating social, environmental, and human capital to create long-term value.
  • No Rules Rules – Reed Hastings with Erin Meyer explore Netflix’s culture of freedom and responsibility, demonstrating how culture can drive agility, experimentation, and repeated reinvention.
  • Humanocracy: Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini advocate flattening bureaucracy and empowering employees, arguing that human-centered organizational design unlocks creativity, innovation, and large-scale transformation.
  • Dual Transformation: Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson provide a framework for simultaneously optimising the core business (Transformation A) and building a new disruptive business (Transformation B) to navigate change successfully.

Across these diverse examples, from Disney’s blockbuster acquisitions to Lego’s turnaround, Fujifilm’s pivot and Netflix’s culture-driven innovation, emerge ten powerful ideas for business reinvention:

1. Develop business models as dynamic portfolios

Manage multiple business models concurrently to balance core exploitation with the exploration of new opportunities.

Alexander Osterwalder argues that sustainable reinvention demands managing a portfolio of business models rather than relying on a single core.  This approach allows companies to maintain revenue from established operations while experimenting with new ventures.

For example, Amazon continues to rely on its retail platform as a foundation, while building new businesses such as AWS, Prime Video, and logistics innovations.

2. Pursue dual transformation: Strengthen core while building new ventures

Successful reinvention requires parallel attention to the present and future, leveraging existing capabilities while exploring new models.

Scott Anthony presents a framework for balancing short-term performance and long-term disruption. Transformation A focuses on optimizing and defending the core business, while Transformation B builds a new growth engine, often in adjacent or entirely new markets.

Adobe, for instance, maintained and optimized its Creative Suite products (Transformation A) while launching Creative Cloud (Transformation B), creating a recurring revenue model that redefined its industry. Similarly, Fujifilm leveraged existing imaging technologies to diversify into healthcare and cosmetics, applying core capabilities to new markets.

3. Embrace purpose-driven strategy and sustainable value

Integrate purpose into strategy to align employees, inspire customers, and sustain long-term value creation.

André Hoffmann argues that reinvention is increasingly purpose-driven. Purpose is no longer a marketing slogan; it shapes strategic priorities, informs decision-making, and aligns the organization around social, environmental, and human goals. Companies like Roche, LEGO, and others have embedded purpose into their core strategies, fostering long-term resilience and stakeholder trust.

A purpose-led approach encourages organizations to make decisions that benefit all stakeholders, not just shareholders, while positioning them to seize opportunities emerging from societal and environmental shifts.

4. Cultivate vigilant, adaptive leadership

Reinvention depends on leaders who anticipate change, inspire confidence, and enable rapid, informed action across the organization.

George Day emphasizes vigilant leadership, the ability to anticipate emerging trends, identify threats, and act proactively.

Disney’s Bob Iger exemplifies this principle. His strategic foresight in acquiring Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox, and positioning Disney for the streaming era, illustrates how leaders can steer organizations through complex transformations.

Vigilant leaders also empower teams to act quickly, providing frameworks that balance autonomy with accountability, enabling the organization to respond to change before competitors do.

5. Reinvent culture as a strategic asset

Shape culture to foster creativity, risk-taking, and alignment with organizational purpose and strategy.

Culture is central to transformation. No Rules Rules explores how Netflix’s freedom-and-responsibility culture drives agility and innovation, showing that removing bureaucracy, rewarding candor, and promoting accountability allows employees to experiment and innovate fearlessly.

Lego’s turnaround, detailed in Brick by Brick, similarly emphasizes aligning culture with purpose and product, nurturing creativity, and instilling operational discipline.

Culture is not incidental—it must be designed deliberately to enable strategic reinvention.

6. Innovate out of crisis: Leverage constraints as catalysts

View crises as opportunities to reimagine the business and apply existing strengths in innovative ways.

Shigetaka Komori’s Innovation Out of Crisis demonstrates that disruption can catalyze creativity and reinvention. Fujifilm’s film business collapse forced the company to pivot into healthcare, cosmetics, and digital imaging, leveraging existing technologies in new markets.

Similarly, economic downturns or competitive pressure often reveal latent capabilities that can be repurposed for growth.

7. Human-centered organisations unlock employee potential

Empower employees through flatter, more adaptive organizational structures to unleash innovation at scale.

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini argue that bureaucracy stifles innovation and slows reinvention. By dismantling rigid hierarchies, reducing unnecessary rules, and empowering employees to make decisions, organizations can tap into collective intelligence and creativity. Companies that embrace human-centric structures—where individuals are trusted to solve problems and contribute ideas—can accelerate transformation far faster than rigidly managed firms.

This principle complements Netflix’s culture (freedom and responsibility) and Lego’s creativity-focused environment, highlighting that organizational design is as important as strategy and technology in enabling reinvention.

8. Customer-centric reinvention: Ground innovation in real needs

Effective reinvention starts with deep insights into customer behavior, enabling solutions that truly resonate.

Marc Randolph, through Netflix’s story, and Lego’s fan engagement, emphasize the power of listening to customers. Innovations should address real pain points rather than be technology- or internally-driven. Netflix iterated its DVD-by-mail and streaming models by testing hypotheses and responding to customer preferences, while LEGO co-created products with fan communities.

9. Strategic risk-taking with disciplined experimentation

Reinvention requires courage tempered with structured experimentation and disciplined execution.

Julian Birkinshaw highlights the need to balance bold experimentation with discipline. Companies like Lego, Disney, Fujifilm, and Netflix pursued calculated risks: exploring new markets, products, or content while maintaining operational and financial control.

Innovation portfolios, pilot programs, and scenario planning enable organizations to fail fast, learn, and scale successful initiatives safely.

10. Reinvention is continuous: Build organisational resilience

Treat reinvention as an ongoing capability, embedding learning, adaptation, and experimentation into organizational DNA.

Across all these examples, the unifying principle is that reinvention is not a one-time event. Lego continually innovates its products and engagement models; Disney regularly integrates new franchises; Netflix evolves its culture and content strategies; Fujifilm continues diversifying into healthcare and beyond.

The Invincible Company underscores the importance of institutionalizing innovation infrastructure, portfolio management, and adaptive leadership, making transformation a repeatable capability rather than a single project.

What can we take away?

10 powerful ideas emerge from these authors and their recent books, about what drives business reinvention, and the broader process of transforming an organisation and its performance:

  • Treat business models dynamically and manage them as portfolios.

  • Pursue dual transformation: optimize core operations while exploring new growth engines.

  • Embed purpose and sustainability into strategy.

  • Cultivate vigilant and adaptive leadership.

  • Design culture to enable creativity, alignment, and agility.

  • Leverage crises as catalysts for innovation.

  • Empower employees through human-centric organizational design

  • Ground reinvention in deep customer insights.

  • Balance bold experimentation with disciplined risk management.

  • Institutionalize continuous reinvention as an organizational capability.

Whether it’s Netflix redefining entertainment, Lego reinventing play, Disney integrating content and technology, Fujifilm pivoting industries, or human-centric organizations flattening bureaucracy to unlock creativity, these lessons converge on one point: successful reinvention is holistic, deliberate, and enduring. It aligns strategy, business models, culture, leadership, and purpose to respond to disruption proactively and continuously.

By integrating these insights, companies can chart a practical roadmap for transformation—balancing the exploitation of existing strengths with the exploration of new opportunities, fostering a culture of empowerment, embedding purpose, and building resilience into the very fabric of the organization.

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