Bold Agendas

As competitive advantage becomes harder to sustain, the challenge facing leaders is no longer simply how to drive innovation, but how to recognize where new value is emerging and deliver it to customers at scale. In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by returning guest Geoffrey Moore to explore how the sources of value are shifting and what organizations must do to compete in the next era of business. Geoffrey is an internationally recognized author, advisor, and venture partner, and one of the most influential thinkers on innovation strategy and market development.

Together, Mimi and Geoffrey discuss why the only value that ultimately matters is the value customers experience. They look at how AI and other emerging technologies are reshaping the value chain and making speed of response a defining dimension of competitive advantage. They also consider why, for many organizations, the greatest challenge lies not in generating new ideas but in carrying innovation beyond the idea stage and delivering it at scale. Drawing on the Zone to Win framework, they examine how leaders can distinguish between infrastructure, operating model, and business model change. They also discuss why genuine transformation depends on sustained executive leadership and a clear sense of purpose, and what effective organizational change management requires when value must flow across silos. They close with how boards and leadership teams can prepare for organizations in which people and intelligent agents work side by side, and what that may require of leadership and management in the years ahead. 

To learn more about Geoffrey's work, follow his blog on LinkedIn, where he writes regularly on Zone to Win, The Infinite Staircase, and many of the ideas discussed in this episode. You can find all of Geoffrey's books on his website.

00:00 – Introduction: Leadership, Value, and the Next Era of Competitive Advantage

03:42 – How AI Is Reshaping the Value Chain

05:08 – Time to Value: An Overlooked Dimension of Competitive Advantage

07:06 – Starting with the Customer Experience

09:45 – From Incubation to Scale: Where Innovation Stalls

11:55 – Revisiting the Four Zones

13:42 – Crossing the Chasm Inside the Enterprise

14:47 – What Transformation Really Means

17:19 – Why Transformation Requires CEO Commitment

20:39 – Leading with Purpose and the Voice of the Customer

25:16 – Orchestrating Change at Scale

27:54 – Three Types of Change: Infrastructure, Operating Model, and Business Model

33:03 – From Silos to End-to-End Value Delivery

34:44 – The Use Case Manager: Connecting Value Across the Organization

40:37 – Why Command-and-Control Cultures Struggle with Disruption

43:05 – Leading Responsibly: AI and Society

48:25 – The Questions Boards Should Be Asking

52:19 – Managing Organizations of People and Agents

55:53 – Rethinking Apprenticeship for the AI Era

59:24 – Where to Find Geoffrey's Work

As AI becomes more capable, the questions facing leaders are no longer just about what technology can do, but how we choose to use it. In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Surinder Lall, author of Leading in the Age of AI: Timeless Wisdom for a Machine-Driven World, global technology executive, and leadership advisor, to explore what ancient philosophy can teach us about leadership in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

Winning with AI requires more than adopting new technology—it requires organizations to learn, adapt, and execute at a different pace. In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by returning guest Charlene Li, keynote speaker, strategic advisor, bestselling author, and co-author of Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success, to explore what differentiates organizations that are succeeding in the AI era and why speed matters more than perfect strategy.

What happens when strategy and technology move forward but the structure of the enterprise doesn’t keep up? In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Whynde Kuehn, founder of S2E Transformation and a leading voice in business architecture, to explore how organizations translate strategy into real operational change.

Together, Mimi and Whynde unpack how organizations still default to technology-first thinking, the role of a clear business blueprint in grounding decisions, and how business architecture helps connect strategy to execution through capabilities, value streams, and operating models. In a landscape increasingly shaped by agentic systems influencing decisions and workflows, Mimi and Whynde explore how governance, control, and decision rights are becoming a central part of enterprise architecture.

Whether you're leading transformation or navigating AI-driven change, this conversation will reframe how you think about the relationship between strategy, structure, and governance.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Introduction: When Structure Can’t Keep Up with Strategy

03:58 – Strategy Execution Gets Harder in the AI Era

07:16 – The Reality of AI and Transformation Today

09:46 – Why AI Is Still Being Driven by Technology

13:07 – The First Step: A Business Blueprint for Decision Making

18:59 – From Change Management to Organizational Readiness

25:11 – Architecture as Governance

30:42 – Designing Governance as a Control Structure

40:45 – Understanding How Decisions Actually Get Made

43:46 – Who Owns Organizational Design and Change

As organizations begin delegating decisions to agentic systems, control can no longer rely on oversight after the fact. In this episode, Mimi Brooks is joined by returning guest Mike Carroll—an expert in industrial innovation, applied AI, and system strategy—to explore what it means to maintain control when decisions happen at machine speed. Together, they unpack why traditional governance breaks down, how causality and decision-making logic shift how decisions are made and governed, and what leaders must rethink about architecture, accountability, and enterprise agency in an increasingly autonomous world.

Agentic systems are reshaping the foundation of the enterprise faster than most organizations can adapt. In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Jesper Lowgren—Agentic Enterprise Architect Lead at DXC technology and creator of the Enterprise Architecture 4.0 framework—to explore how enterprise architecture, governance, and leadership must evolve for the agentic era.

Together, they examine Enterprise Architecture 4.0, the new governance requirements of agentic systems, and why leaders must shift from reactive oversight to governing through real-time guardrails and conditions. Jesper shares the mindset shifts leaders need, the risks of operating between legacy and agentic systems, and what sets organizations up for success as autonomy and uncertainty redefine the enterprise.

If you’d like to reach out to Jesper, you can find him on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesper-lowgren/) or on his website (https://www.jesperlowgren.com/)

Jesper’s Books:

- Design or Be Designed: The Agentic AI Survival Guide

- Agentic Governance: Governing the Space Between

Timestamps:

00:00 – The Agentic Shift: Rethinking Architecture, Governance, and Leadership for Real-Time Enterprise

10:03 – Governance as Strategy: Designing Constraints for Agentic Systems

14:10 – Redefining Enterprise Architecture for the Agentic Era

18:38 – How Legacy Enterprises Begin the Shift Toward Agentic Systems

23:37 – Understanding Emergence: Why Traditional Architecture Can’t Support Agentic Systems

27:16 – Understanding Micro and Macro Governance in Agentic Systems

29:13 – Shifting Leadership Toward Governance Embedded in the System

31:07 – Embedding Governance into Transformation Strategy for the Agentic Era

36:49 – Avoiding the Gray Zone: The Danger of Operating Between Legacy and Agentic Systems

40:40 – The Challenge of Living in Transitional States During Transformation

43:20 – The Five Mindset Shifts Leaders Need for the Agentic Era

48:02 – Connecting AI Maturity Models to Leadership Mindset Readiness

55:59 – The Challenge of Technical and Cultural Debt in an Agentic World

57:48 – What Sets Leaders Up for Success in Agentic Transformation

01:02:39 – Where to Find Jesper’s Work on Agentic Governance and System Design

An important lesson emerged in 2025: incremental transformation is no longer enough. In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Pieter van Schalkwyk—CEO of XMPRO, author of Building Industrial Digital Twins, and a leader in the Digital Twin Consortium—to explore why today’s operating models are reaching a breaking point.

Together, they unpack the systemic pressures reshaping operations—aging infrastructure, rising complexity, talent loss, and unsustainable work models—and why technology alone can’t fix them. From the cognitive burden on frontline workers to the fragility of legacy systems, Pieter makes the case for agentic intelligence, human-centered design, and rethinking productivity itself. It’s a conversation that spans intelligent digital twins, organizational modeling, decision intelligence, and the call to move from experimentation to action.

Read Pieter’s article with co-author Michael Carroll, “Obituary for 2025: The Year We Buried the Copilot Dream and Discovered What Intelligence Actually Requires”

Timestamps:

00:00 – Introduction: The Strategic Case for Reinventing Operations

03:15 – Why Operational Models Need Reinvention, Not Incremental Fixes

08:20 – People as the Point of Rationalization in Complex Systems

15:53 – Leadership’s Awareness and Urgency Gap

18:34 – System Experts and the Knowledge Gap in Industrial Transformation

21:48 – Common Mistakes Leaders Make in Transformation

29:00 – Priorities for Redesigning Your Ops Model

35:05 – The Value of Digital Twins in Future Operating Models

39:51 – A Practical Roadmap to Operational Autonomy

45:18 – The Real Transformation Challenge: People, Not Tech

47:34 – Digital Twins of the Organization: Modeling Culture, Strategy, and Decision-Making

51:33 – Relational Dynamics: A New Lens on Organizational Context

56:15 – Lessons from 2025: Letting Go, Designing for Humans, and Looking Ahead

As we close out 2025, one thing is clear: this has been a year of acceleration. We saw the promises of AI tested against operational reality, watched composable enterprises take shape, and saw governance, trust, and resilience move from the edges of strategy to its center.

What if your organization wasn’t just digital, but living? In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Nicolas Waern, Founder of WINNIIO, CEO and Founder of Life Atlas, and Co-Chair of the Digital Twin Consortium’s Manufacturing Working Group, to explore how digital twins, AI, and platform thinking are redefining the enterprise. Nicolas makes the case that the future of decision-making won’t be driven by prediction, but by rehearsal, simulating thousands of future scenarios before a single action is taken.

What does leadership look like when one leader can’t do it all? In this episode of Bold Agendas, Mimi Brooks is joined by Deborah Ancona, MIT Sloan professor and founding director of the MIT Leadership Center, to explore a radical shift in how we understand and practice leadership. Drawing from her groundbreaking research on X-Teams and the Incomplete Leader, Deborah makes the case that today’s complexity demands more than individual brilliance, it requires collective capability.