The Reinvention Toolkit … 10 smarter ways to reinvent strategy, business models, organisations, processes, culture, leadership, and performance

May 20, 2025

This toolkit is taken from Peter Fisk’s new book The Reinvention Playbook, and are also offered as an executive workshop for business leaders, connecting personal development and preparing to transform their organisations.

In a world defined by relentless change—technological disruption, climate imperatives, geopolitical shocks, and shifting consumer aspirations—business reinvention is no longer optional. The companies that thrive are not simply resilient; they are reinventive. They embrace change as a constant, and build the ability to transform themselves repeatedly and deliberately.

But reinvention is not an abstract aspiration. It requires practical tools—frameworks, mindsets, and methods—that help leaders reimagine markets, business models, organizations, and themselves.

Here we explore the 10 best tools for business reinvention, drawn from research and practice, and illustrated by companies that have reinvented with purpose and performance.

1. Future Ready

Tool: Future Readiness Frameworks, Scenario Stress Tests, Strategic Agility Indices

Before embarking on transformation, companies must ask: how future-ready are we? Tools that assess preparedness allow organisations to benchmark against disruption, resilience, and innovation capabilities.

Tools like the IMD Future Readiness Indicator or frameworks from McKinsey’s Resilience Compass provide structured ways to assess readiness across dimensions such as innovation, digitalization, sustainability, adaptability, and talent.

A readiness assessment surfaces strengths and vulnerabilities. For example, Fujifilm recognized early in the 2000s that its reliance on photographic film would not survive the digital wave. A candid assessment of market trends and internal capabilities drove its bold pivot into healthcare, materials science, and document solutions.

Similarly, Ping An of China, ranked consistently highly: it transformed from a traditional insurer into a sprawling fintech and health-tech ecosystem, building AI, big data, and platform capabilities long before incumbents recognized the shift.

How to use it:

  • Conduct scenario stress tests to see how your business model holds up against shifts (e.g., carbon taxes, AI adoption, consumer activism).

  • Use benchmarking surveys to measure agility across leadership, digital infrastructure, and culture.

  • Identify capability gaps—the difference between where you are and what the future will demand.

Leaders should use readiness tools not only diagnostically but also prescriptively: to chart specific gaps and create action plans. This gives reinvention a fact-based foundation.

2. Change Radar

Tool: Strategic Foresight, Trendspotting, Early-Warning Radar Systems

The best companies don’t just respond to market shifts—they sense them early – and change before they have to. Tools for market sensemaking include horizon scanning, scenario planning, and weak-signal analysis. Rita McGrath’s concept of “seeing around corners” is particularly useful: it trains leaders to spot inflection points—moments when industries change shape.

Consider Disney, which sensed the streaming revolution and moved aggressively with Disney+. Despite cannibalizing parts of its traditional media empire, the move ensured it stayed relevant in the digital-first content economy. Similarly, Ping An anticipated that finance was moving toward ecosystems, not siloed products, and invested early in fintech, health tech, and smart city services.

How to use it:

  • Build dedicated foresight teams to scan adjacent industries, emerging technologies, and societal shifts.

  • Invest in ethnographic research to uncover unarticulated customer needs.

  • Develop a “change radar”—a dashboard of indicators that trigger leadership attention when trends accelerate.

Reinvention requires peripheral vision—seeing sooner and acting faster than rivals. Sensemaking tools help businesses act before they are forced to—driving proactive, not reactive, reinvention.

3. Market Making

Tool: Blue Ocean Strategy, Jobs-to-Be-Done, Market-Making Playbooks

Reinvention often requires creating entirely new market spaces—what W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne call Blue Oceans. Tools like customer journey mapping, jobs-to-be-done frameworks, and non-customer analysis help organizations imagine new demand frontiers.

Mercado Libre is a prime example. Originally an e-commerce marketplace, it created new growth spaces by adding payments (Mercado Pago), logistics (Mercado Envios), and lending. This market-making mindset turned Mercado Libre into Latin America’s leading digital ecosystem, not just an online retailer.

How to use it:

  • Identify customer frustrations and unmet aspirations, then design solutions that dissolve old industry borders.

  • Map “jobs to be done” in people’s lives—then ask, how can we serve them more fully?

  • Pursue adjacency plays: use core strengths to create new demand spaces.

Reinvention is often about expanding the canvas, from serving markets to shaping them. Market-making tools help companies shift from defending old boundaries to imagining new possibilities.

4. Business Model Reinvention

Tool: Business Model Canvas 2.0, Circular Economy Frameworks, AI Value Maps

The Business Model Canvas remains a vital tool, but reinvention today often requires expanding it with lenses like sustainability and AI capabilities. Companies must ask:

  • How do we integrate environmental and social value creation?

  • How do we embed new technologies into the core of the model?

Ørsted, for instance, transformed its business model from fossil fuels to renewable energy, becoming the world’s largest offshore wind producer. Ping An embedded AI across healthcare and insurance to scale new models of risk management and preventive care. These cases highlight that the next wave of business models are regenerative, data-driven, and ecosystem-oriented.

How to use it:

  • Map your existing business model—then ask, how can AI, sustainability, or ecosystems transform each building block?

  • Explore circular models (reuse, recycling, sharing) that align with global climate agendas.

  • Stress-test models against digital disruption and ESG demands.

Reinvention demands transformational new models of value creation, not just incremental efficiency.

5. Future Portfolios

Tool: Dual Transformation Frameworks, Ambidextrous Organizations

One of the most practical reinvention frameworks is Dual Transformation: Transformation A strengthens the current core, while Transformation B builds the future. The bridge between them is new capabilities.

Fujifilm exemplifies this: Transformation A kept its imaging and printing businesses profitable; Transformation B built new pillars in healthcare and advanced materials. Similarly, Microsoft under Satya Nadella kept Windows and Office profitable while reinventing itself around Azure cloud and AI.

Similarly, you might define two portfolios – exploit and explore. The exploit portfolio brings together all of the initiatives that improve and innovate the current business, while the explore portfolio focuses on the initiatives that invent and innovate the future business. You need to manage both portfolios simultaneously.

How to use it:

  • Structure innovation portfolios with distinct metrics for core, adjacent, and transformational bets.

  • Build ambidextrous leadership teams, with different incentives and governance for exploit vs. explore.

  • Foster “strategic patience”—accepting that new businesses need time to mature.

The dual transformation tool helps leaders avoid the “either/or” trap. Reinvention is about both exploiting today and exploring tomorrow, managed as a portfolio.

6. Burning Ambition

Tool: Making the Case for Change, Transformation Storytelling, Disruption Simulations

One of the hardest parts of reinvention is mobilizing urgency before crisis hits. Tools like Kotter’s change model and storytelling frameworks for “burning platforms” help leaders articulate why transformation is needed now—not later.

Netflix, under Reed Hastings, famously disrupted its own DVD rental business by launching streaming long before physical rentals collapsed. It framed the shift as essential for survival and growth. Pfizer’s rapid pivot during Covid-19 showed the power of urgency. By embracing mRNA technology and partnering with BioNTech, Pfizer transformed its R&D model in record time—mobilizing its entire workforce and ecosystem toward a single mission.

The lesson: leaders must create urgency without waiting for disaster, using tools that combine data, foresight, and narrative power.

How to use it:

  • Use simulations to show how disruption could erode your market if no change occurs.

  • Craft narratives that emotionally connect employees and stakeholders to the necessity of reinvention.

  • Balance the “fear of loss” with the “hope of opportunity.”

Transformation requires a burning ambition, not just a burning platform.

7. Change Alignment

Tool: Culture-Strategy Alignment Maps, Operating Model Redesign, Humanocracy Principles

Reinvention fails when external strategies outpace internal change. Tools like the Operating Model Canvas, McKinsey’s 7S Framework, or alignment maps help ensure that new market strategies align with internal culture, processes, and capabilities.

Ping An’s reinvention was not just about launching fintech products—it built an organizational model where technology capabilities, AI, and ecosystems were integrated into the operating DNA. Similarly, Unilever has aligned its sustainability-driven external strategy with deep cultural change inside the company, embedding purpose and ESG into decision-making.

Haier, the Chinese appliance giant, reinvented itself into a network of entrepreneurial micro-enterprises, aligning its internal model with its external strategy of hyper-customer responsiveness. Netflix, through its “No Rules Rules” culture, aligned radical empowerment with the demands of a fast-changing streaming market.

How to use it:

  • Map how your strategy requires cultural and organizational shifts.

  • Use operating model redesign tools to break bureaucracy and empower teams.

  • Adopt principles of humanocracy—making organizations more human, less bureaucratic.

Reinvention fails when strategy races ahead of culture. Both must transform together. Alignment tools keep reinvention coherent, so the inside matches the outside.

8. Transformation Roadmap

Tool: Transformation Roadmaps, S-Curve Mapping, Capability Maturity Models

Business transformation is rarely a one-off project; it’s a multi-year journey. Tools like transformation roadmaps, agile metrics, and portfolio governance models help structure reinvention in phases.

Disney’s transformation under Bob Iger illustrates this. Over 15 years, Iger reimagined Disney through acquisitions (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm), digital platforms (Disney+), and cultural renewal. Each phase built on the previous, compounding value creation.

Siemens used a staged transformation roadmap to pivot from industrial conglomerate to digital-industrial leader, focusing sequentially on digital twins, IoT platforms, and smart infrastructure. Each phase built capabilities for the next.

How to use it:

  • Design transformation as a staged journey: defend, extend, transcend.

  • Map required capabilities and investments at each stage.

  • Regularly update the roadmap to reflect evolving external realities.

The roadmap tool ensures reinvention is sequenced, measurable, and adaptive—rather than chaotic. Reinvention is not a sprint. It’s a marathon of S-curves.

9. Value Impact

Tool: Value Creation Scorecards, ESG-Integrated Metrics, Long-Term Incentives

Reinvention is only complete when performance is measured differently. Tools like the Integrated Reporting Framework, ESG scorecards, and long-term value creation metrics (used by the World Economic Forum) help leaders move beyond short-term profit toward holistic impact.

Danone, during its transformation into a health-focused food company, adopted integrated reporting to balance financial, social, and environmental metrics. BlackRock now pressures portfolio companies to show long-term value creation beyond quarterly earnings.

For instance, Mercado Libre reinvented Latin American commerce while also building financial inclusion for millions of underbanked citizens. Its performance is measured not just in GMV growth, but in the new ecosystem of opportunity it has created.

How to use it:

  • Redesign performance dashboards to include innovation, sustainability, and inclusion metrics.

  • Link executive incentives to long-term reinvention outcomes, not just quarterly EPS.

  • Benchmark against peer leaders in value creation (e.g., McKinsey’s Long-Term Value Index).

By adopting new performance tools, companies ensure their reinvention creates enduring impact, not just temporary wins. Reinvention pays off when it creates enduring, transformational value.

10. Reinvent Yourself

Tool: Adaptive Leadership Models, Resilience Training, Personal Reinvention Journeys

Finally, reinvention is deeply personal. Leaders cannot expect organizations to transform if they themselves cling to old mindsets. Tools for self-reinvention—coaching, resilience practices, adaptive leadership models—equip leaders to navigate uncertainty with clarity and courage.

Satya Nadella’s leadership at Microsoft is a case in point. By reinventing himself as a learning-driven, empathetic leader, Nadella unlocked cultural and strategic reinvention across Microsoft—from a combative “know-it-all” culture to a collaborative “learn-it-all” mindset.

Bob Iger’s leadership at Disney, chronicled in The Ride of a Lifetime, shows reinvention leadership in practice: bold acquisitions (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm), digital transformation (Disney+), and a culture of creativity.

How to use it:

  • Embrace lifelong learning, especially in emerging fields like AI, sustainability, and systems thinking.

  • Build resilience practices to thrive under ambiguity.

  • Model vulnerability and curiosity—creating psychological safety for reinvention.

Reinvention starts with you, and with self-reinvention.

In summary:

Business reinvention is no longer episodic—it’s continuous. The 10 tools outlined here provide a practical playbook for leaders:

  • Assess your future readiness.

  • Sense markets and time change.

  • Create new market spaces.

  • Reinvent business models with new agendas.

  • Balance exploit and explore.

  • Make the case for change.

  • Align strategy with culture and organization.

  • Map multi-year journeys.

  • Reinvent performance metrics.

  • Reinvent yourself as a leader.

The examples of Ping An, Fujifilm, Mercado Libre, Disney, Pfizer, and others remind us that reinvention is not only possible, but powerful. It requires courage, foresight, and discipline. More than anything, it requires leaders who embrace reinvention not as a one-time act, but as a way of life.

More from the blog