Most people assume food miles are the enemy of sustainable sourcing. They are wrong. Transportation and freight account for less than 10% of a food product's total environmental impact. The real challenge — and the real opportunity — is at the farm.

Defne Saral, Senior Vice President of Sales at ofi, one of the world's largest processors of cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices, and dairy ingredients, joins Mark Blackwell to explain how ofi is building a verified sustainability data infrastructure across 2 million hectares of land managed by millions of independent smallholder farmers in West Africa and beyond.

They discuss ofi's Choices for Change framework and what the 2025 Impact Report actually shows; how ofi's proprietary AtSource platform measures greenhouse gas emissions at farm level, independently verified by Carbon Trust; why Scope 3 emissions represent around 80% of most food companies' carbon footprint, and what that means for ingredient suppliers; the role of satellite polygon mapping, drone technology, and agronomic science in building a data graph without connected machinery; the EU deforestation directive and what compliance actually requires; and how AI could compress the sustainability reporting cycle and sharpen the signal-to-noise ratio in natural ingredient data.

Defne also makes the case for democratising sustainability data — making it affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized food companies, not just those with the scale to bear the compliance cost.

This episode follows directly from last week's conversation with Professor Venkat Venkatraman on Fusion Strategy and industrial AI. Together they form a two-part picture of what it looks like to design intelligence into a business model rather than paint it on top.

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]

What if the companies that think AI is someone else's problem are about to lose their most valuable competitive ground?

Professor Venkat Venkatraman from Boston University's Questrom School of Business is the co-author of Fusion Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press) and one of the world's leading authorities on how legacy industrial firms use real-time data networks and AI to reinvent their business models.

In this episode, Mark and Venkat explore:

• Why roughly $75 trillion of the global economy has yet to be systematically digitised — and why that is the most significant business opportunity of the next decade
• The difference between digital paint and digital structure: how to know whether your organisation is adding AI at the periphery or redesigning around intelligence at the core
• What datagraphs are, why they matter more than systems of record, and how industrial companies can unlock the same network effects that drove Netflix, Amazon and Spotify
• Why the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to an AI researcher — and what that tells us about the fusion of traditional industries with data and intelligence
• The ecosystem shift from economies of scale to economies of expertise — and why a mid-sized chemicals or food ingredients company may be better placed than it thinks
• What a CEO should actually do in the next 90 days to prepare for the intelligence age without simply automating the past

Connect with Venkat Venkatraman: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/venkatraman/

Fusion Strategy: available now from Harvard Business Review Press
Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data — exploring how humans and machines can work together to create intelligence. Published 15 September 2026.

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What if the teams that struggle to define their problem early are actually your best innovation bet?

Dr Johnathan Cromwell, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of San Francisco, shares findings from a study of over 1,100 real innovation teams at a Fortune Global 500 company. The results overturn one of the most deeply held assumptions in innovation management: teams that started with low problem clarity but gained it by the midpoint achieved an implementation rate of over 80% — compared to approximately 50% for teams that defined their problem clearly from the outset.

In this episode, Mark and Johnathan explore:

• Why problem and solution co-evolve rather than follow a linear sequence — and what that means for how you run innovation projects
• The critical midpoint transition: why the halfway point of any project is the moment that determines success or failure
• How to manage a portfolio of front-end innovation projects when ambiguity is a feature, not a bug
• Why Jobs to Be Done are not as stable over time as the framework assumes — and where the five whys technique changes the game
• How AI is not just solving existing problems faster but revealing entirely new problems companies did not know they had
• The three modes of AI adoption: exploiting existing problems (Instacart), expanding the problem (Khan Academy), and exploring new ones entirely

Johnathan also shares practical advice for the VP of Innovation under pressure to show return on investment — and why dismissing projects without a clear problem definition may mean dismissing your best future innovations.

Published research referenced in this episode:

• Cromwell & Harvey (2026). The Hidden Power of Messy Teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2026.
• Cromwell & Harvey (2025). A Problem Half-Solved Is a Problem Well-Stated. Research Policy, 54(3).

Connect with Johnathan Cromwell: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/johncromwell/

Connect with Mark Blackwell and Arkaro: Website: www.arkaro.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell

📺 YouTube: www.youtube.com/@arkaro 🎧 Audio: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com/

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Success is supposed to be the goal. So why does it so often destroy the very thing that made an organisation great? Eric Ries — author of The Lean Startup — returns with a new book and a sobering answer.

What if the greatest threat to a successful organisation is not competition, disruption, or poor strategy — but success itself?

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, has spent the past decade studying a force more powerful than management: a financial gravity that pulls even the most values-driven organisations away from their founding missions as they grow. In his new book Incorruptible, he explains where this force comes from, which organisations have learned to resist it, and what leaders can do — starting on Monday — to protect what they are building.

What we cover:

The one-legged stool — How shareholder primacy became the default setting of modern capitalism, why the evidence for it is shockingly weak, and what the three-legged stool of purpose, stakeholders, and investors actually looks like in practice.

The exceptions that prove nothing is inevitable — Grundfos, Bosch, Novo Nordisk, Costco, H-E-B. Why do these companies consistently outperform their conventionally governed peers — and what structural choices make the difference?

The US healthcare anomaly — The Our World in Data chart that shows the US spending twice as much per capita as comparable countries and achieving lower life expectancy. Eric explains the mechanism behind it — and why it appears in transit, journalism, and sport too.

Devoted Health — Former US CTO Todd Park's full-stack healthcare company, built on the principle that it can only profit by keeping patients healthy. A live demonstration that the alternative is commercially viable.

Mary Parker Follett and the invisible leader — The management theorist written out of history who knew more about purpose-driven organisations than almost anyone since. Her concept of the invisible leader — the shared purpose that guides behaviour when no manager is present — is the foundation of everything Eric argues in the book.

The culture bank — How H-E-B built the most trusted grocery brand in Texas not through marketing but through a hundred decisions to do the right thing, including sending customers home with full carts during a winter storm without taking payment.

You are not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic. — Why individual agency matters more than most people think in an age of surveillance capitalism, and what founders, leaders, employees, and consumers can each do to resist financial gravity in their own sphere.

📊 Life Expectancy vs. Healthcare Spending (Our World in Data): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-healthcare-expenditure

📖 Incorruptible by Eric Ries: www.incorruptible.co — bonus chapter, implementation guides, and reader resources

🔗 Connect with Eric Ries: linkedin.com/in/eries

About Eric Ries Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup (2011) and The Startup Way (2017), and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). His new book Incorruptible (2026) examines the structural forces that pull successful organisations away from their founding missions and provides a practical framework for resisting them.

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Two thirds of business leaders face imminent disruption, yet most are reaching for AI as a forklift to move their intellectual weight for them. Scott Anthony returns to Arkaro Insights to argue this is exactly the wrong instinct.

In this follow-up to our conversation on Epic Disruptions, Scott — Clinical Professor at the Tuck School of Business and former senior partner at Innosight — explores what it takes to develop the wisdom, not just the tools, to navigate the AI-era "great unfreezing." His thesis is uncomfortable but clear: the right way is the hard way, and the muscle gets built through experience that feels much more like play than punishment.

Mark Blackwell and Scott unpack the four AI pathologies leaders need to recognise (idea bubbles, power persuasion, cognitive debt and brain fry), Ethan Mollick's cyborg-centaur-chauffeur framework for working with AI, and why dancing at the jagged frontier matters more than reading about it. They explore the difference between technical and adaptive challenges, what the US military and a few game-based pioneers like Chris Rangen already know about experiential learning, and what a "gym for the mind" might look like for a workforce no longer building cognitive muscle on the job.

The episode closes with a concrete Monday-morning move any leader can make: pick a problem your team faces repeatedly, and design a low-stakes AI simulation around it. Scott's own example took fifteen minutes to build.

About Scott D. Anthony

Scott D. Anthony is Clinical Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He previously spent more than two decades at Innosight, the growth strategy consultancy founded by Clayton Christensen, including a period as senior partner. Thinkers50 named him the world's leading innovative thinker in 2017 and the ninth most influential management thinker in 2023. He is the author of Epic Disruptions and the forthcoming Epic Leadership.

Related Arkaro Insights episodes

• Why Companies Miss Disruption: The 3 Ghosts — Scott Anthony's first Arkaro conversation: https://arkaro.com/why-companies-miss-disruption/
• The Steam Engine Mistake Companies Are Repeating with AI — Joseph Fuller, Harvard Business School: https://arkaro.com/joseph-fuller-ai-implementation-strategy-harvard/
• AI Governance: How to Use AI Without It Going Wrong — Ray Eitel-Porter: https://arkaro.com/ray-eitel-porter-on-ai-goveranceai-governance-ray-eitel-porter/
• The Neuroscience of Collaboration: The SPACES Model — Hilary Scarlett: https://arkaro.com/neuroscience-collaboration-spaces-model/
• Slow AI: Why Rushing to Solutions Kills Creativity — Dr Vlad Glaveanu: https://arkaro.com/slow-ai-creativity-incubation/
• AI and Jobs to Be Done: Where Human Judgement Wins — Scott Burleson: https://arkaro.com/ai-jobs-to-be-done-human-judgement/

Connect with Arkaro:

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn:
Arkaro Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arkaro
Mark Blackwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Newsletter - Arkaro Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/arkaro-insights-6924308904973631488/

🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]

Most leadership failure is not a strategy problem. It is a presence problem.

In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell speaks with Linden Thorp, a Buddhist priest, somatic practitioner, communication specialist, and creator of the Lodestone Method. After more than four decades in academia, contemplative practice, and now executive boardrooms, Linden has watched leader after leader run on what she calls "the brilliant but limited mind", an intellectual firework display that captivates the room and then leaves a plume of smoke behind.

This conversation explores what gets neglected underneath the slide deck and the strategy: the body, the breath, and the wider nervous system. The layer Linden argues is the actual seat of leadership presence.

In this episode:

• Why most leadership failure is a presence problem, not a strategy problem
• The brilliant but limited mind, and what intellectual firework displays cost teams
• Burnout as a loss of nervous-system regulation, not just a psychological state
• The parable of the ruby in the hem of the coat
• What a tribal leader in Arnhem Land taught Linden about whole-body listening
• Why physiological safety is different from psychological safety, and why leaders need both
• The distinction between the leader who speaks and the leader who is present
• Three Monday-morning practices any leader can try: breath gratitude, 3D visualisation, and diaphragmatic breathing
• A business case in a supermarket strike

About the guest

Linden Thorp is a Buddhist priest, somatic practitioner, communication specialist, former professional musician, and creator of the Lodestone Method. Her work draws on decades of experience in education, voice, bodywork, contemplative practice, and embodied leadership. She is the author of Your Body is Your Business Plan and is based in Tokyo, Japan.

Find Linden at lindenthorp.com and her Lodestone Inside programme at lindenthorp.com/lodestone-inside. She is most active on LinkedIn.

Related episodes

• Hilary Scarlett on the SPACES model and the neuroscience of collaboration
• Garrett Forsythe on the transition from technical expert to leader
• Keith Sawyer on group genius and the ten conditions for group flow

#Leadership #Presence #SomaticLeadership #Burnout #NervousSystem #EmbodiedLeadership #ChangeManagement #B2BLeadership #ArkaroInsights

Connect with Arkaro:

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

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"There are no executives alive on the planet today that have ever overseen the implementation of a general purpose technology to their organisations." — Joseph Fuller, Harvard Business School

Most companies are making the same mistake with AI that factory owners made when electricity arrived in the 1880s — bolting the new technology onto old processes and calling it transformation.

Around 60% of companies are treating AI as a technology problem and handing it to the CTO. It is a management problem. In this episode, Joseph Fuller of Harvard Business School explains what to do instead — and why the companies that get this right may not be the ones you expect.

About Joseph Fuller

Joseph Fuller is Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and co-head of the Managing the Future of Work project, which he founded. A former CEO of global strategy firm Monitor Group, he advises leading organisations on AI adoption, workforce transformation, and organisational design.

Joseph Fuller

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephbfuller/
American Enterprise Institute: https://www.aei.org/profile/joseph-b-fuller/

HBS Managing the Future of Work:

Project: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Pages/default.aspx
Newsletter: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/newsletter/Pages/default.aspx Podcast: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hbs-managing-the-future-of-work/id1395603706
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3zUxYNebA2rrEuH0IJcrJ2
Amazon Podcasts: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJJPGGPX
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/project-on-managing-the-future-of-work/

Related Arkaro Insights episodes:

Stephen Wunker on AI and the Octopus Organisation: https://arkaro.com/ai-octopus-organization-stephen-wunker/

Charlene Li on Why AI Transformation Fails: https://arkaro.com/why-ai-transformation-fails-leaders-90-days-charlene-li/ 

Niels van Hove on AI and Decision-Centric Planning: https://arkaro.com/niels-van-hove-ai-sop-ibp-decision-centric-planning/ 

Marco Ryan on Rewire or Retire: https://arkaro.com/rewire-retire-ai-leadership-marco-ryan/

Connect with Arkaro:

🔗 Follow us on LinkedIn:
Arkaro Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arkaro
Mark Blackwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Newsletter - Arkaro Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/arkaro-insights-6924308904973631488/

🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

📺 Subscribe to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@arkaro

Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]

What separates a high-performing team from a group of talented individuals who consistently underperform? According to Dr Keith Sawyer, the answer lies in group flow — a state of peak collective experience that goes far beyond individual performance.

Dr Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor of Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity, collaboration, and innovation. A jazz pianist who has performed with Chicago improvisational theater groups, he has spent decades studying how peak creative performance emerges not inside a single mind, but between minds.

In this episode, Mark Blackwell and Keith Sawyer explore the ten conditions for group flow, why improvisation is always a balance between structure and freedom, how problem-finding is fundamentally different from problem-solving and why that distinction matters for business teams, the Goldilocks quality that runs through every one of the ten conditions, why groupthink and group flow are two sides of the same coin, and what jazz and improv theater can teach organisations about building teams that consistently outperform.

Building on previous Arkaro Insights conversations with Roni Reiter-Palmon on creative problem solving and Hilary Scarlett on the neuroscience of collaboration, this episode adds a compelling new layer: the social and improvisational dynamics that allow groups to achieve something greater than the sum of their parts.

Keith’s book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration is available at https://a.co/d/0aBHbJ0p. His podcast The Science of Creativity is at sawyerpodcast.com and his Substack newsletter at keithsawyer.substack.com.

Connect with Arkaro:

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🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]

What if innovation were not a mysterious creative gift but a measurable engineering discipline? That is exactly the argument Professor David Cropley of the University of Adelaide makes — and he has the diagnostic framework to back it up.

In this episode of Arkaro Insights, Mark Blackwell talks with David about why most organisations are failing at innovation, where precisely the failure occurs, and what leaders can do about it.

David introduces the Innovation Phase Model, a 42-cell diagnostic matrix that maps seven stages of innovation against six psychosocial dimensions. Administered as a survey across teams and organisations, it pinpoints exactly where the roadblocks are — and consistently reveals the same pattern: most organisations are competent at implementation but struggle badly at the front end, where problems need to be identified and ideas generated before anything can be built.

They also discuss why AI is being deployed the wrong way in most organisations — treated as a product innovation when it is fundamentally a process innovation — and David shares the mathematical proof that large language models are capped at roughly average human creativity. Useful, but not the innovation engine many believe it to be.

The Smith Corona story brings it home: a world-class innovator that went bankrupt because it could only think incrementally when disruption arrived.

In this episode:

• The Innovation Phase Model and the 42-cell diagnostic
• Why structure determines behaviour, and most people are rewarded for exploiting not exploring
• AI as a process innovation being treated as a product — and why that matters
• The mathematical ceiling on large language model creativity
• Three things a new CEO or VP should do first to build a genuine innovation culture

Guest: Professor David Cropley, University of Adelaide Author of The Psychology of Innovation in Organizations (Cambridge University Press) 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidcropley

Connect with Arkaro:

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Arkaro Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arkaro
Mark Blackwell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Newsletter - Arkaro Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/arkaro-insights-6924308904973631488/

🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]

What if sustainability weren't a cost of doing business, but its central engine? That is exactly the transformation Juan Aguiriano, Group Head of Sustainability at Kerry, has helped to architect over the past seven years.

In this episode, Juan traces Kerry's journey from its roots as an Irish dairy cooperative to its emergence as what the company calls an impact company, with an audacious mission to reach over two billion people with sustainable nutrition solutions by 2030.

We explore how Kerry's Beyond the Horizon strategy moved sustainability from implicit good practice to an explicit business choice, reshaping the company's portfolio, investment decisions and innovation pipeline. Juan explains the "and equation" at the heart of Kerry's approach: making food that is healthy, affordable, tasty and sustainable, all at once.

The conversation covers:

• How Kerry built its purpose, "inspiring food, nourishing life," through dialogue with tens of thousands of employees worldwide
• The five strategic impact themes driving Kerry's sustainability agenda, from nutrition and climate to responsible sourcing and social impact
• The Evolve programme: how Kerry worked with 3,000 Irish dairy farmers and Bord Bia to create what became the world's most sustainably verified dairy supply chain
• Why extending shelf life through natural fermentation and biotechnology is one of the most cost-effective tools in the fight against food waste
• How the Kerry Health and Nutrition Institute (KHNI) is advancing the science of sustainable nutrition
• The role of digital tools and AI in scaling and accelerating impact

Juan brings the perspective of a realistic optimist: the physical risks facing the global food system are accelerating, yet the cultural shift inside Kerry, where sustainability has become everyone's business, gives genuine cause for confidence.

A compelling case study in how doing good and doing well are not in conflict, but increasingly inseparable.

Connect with Arkaro:

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Newsletter - Arkaro Insights: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/arkaro-insights-6924308904973631488/

🌐 Visit our website: www.arkaro.com

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Audio Podcast: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com

📧 For business enquiries: [email protected]