Gordon Hewitt
Sustained competitive advantage has stopped behaving the way strategy textbooks promised. Incumbents with strong positions are being overtaken by entrants who change the rules of the game rather than play it better. The harder question for boards is not how to defend the current business, it is how to keep creating new value when the industry definition itself keeps moving.
Gordon Hewitt is a strategy professor and board-level advisor who helps senior leaders rethink how their companies create value when industry rules are being rewritten by disruption.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Gordon Hewitt
- Direct intellectual lineage from C.K. Prahalad at Michigan Ross, applied for two decades to live board agendas at Pfizer, IBM, AstraZeneca, HSBC, Sony, and Deutsche Post/DHL.
- A working method that treats strategy as a thinking system for senior teams, not a planning cycle, so boards leave with sharper questions about value creation, not a deck.
- Demonstrated range across pharma, financial services, consumer goods, telecoms, and logistics, which lets him connect cross-industry disruption patterns most sector specialists miss.
- CBE for services to management and international business, plus Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, signal a level of institutional credibility boards trust at chair and CEO level.
- A genuine practitioner-academic: still teaching at Michigan Ross and Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School while advising sitting CEOs.
Biography highlights
- CBE for services to management and international business, 2007 New Year Honours.
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
- Visiting Distinguished Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
- Professor of Strategy Practice, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow.
- Distinguished Professor of Corporate Strategy, Duke Corporate Education.
- Long collaboration with the late C.K. Prahalad on corporate value-creation, innovation, and strategic transformation.
- Advised CEOs and boards at Pfizer, IBM, AstraZeneca, Philips, Sony, Honeywell, PwC, Verizon, Ericsson, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Time Warner, PepsiCo, Syngenta, Biocon, and Deutsche Post/DHL.
Biography
Most strategy frameworks assume the rules of the industry hold still long enough for a plan to play out. They no longer do. The companies that struggle are often the ones that ran the previous playbook best.
Gordon Hewitt has spent two decades helping senior leaders work in that more unstable terrain. At the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, he formed a long partnership with the late C.K. Prahalad, working at the front edge of thinking on corporate value-creation, innovation, and strategic transformation in what they described as a game-changing world. That body of work continues to anchor how he talks to boards.
The list of organisations he has advised reads like a cross-industry map of where disruption hits hardest: Pfizer and AstraZeneca in pharma, IBM and Verizon in technology, HSBC and Credit Suisse in financial services, Sony, PepsiCo, and Time Warner in consumer-facing businesses, Deutsche Post/DHL in logistics. He chairs CEO and chairman peer groups in Europe and the United States on the future of corporate strategy and governance.
He was awarded a CBE in 2007 for services to management and international business, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He continues to hold appointments at Michigan Ross, Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, and Duke Corporate Education, which is unusual for a working board advisor and is one of the reasons CEOs treat him as a serious thinking partner rather than a speaker.
Key speaking topics
- Strategy under industry disruption
- Corporate value creation in complex markets
- Innovation as a discipline
- Strategic transformation in incumbent businesses
- Strategic collaboration and ecosystem strategy
- Overcoming industry and organisational orthodoxies
- The CEO and board agenda in a game-changing world
Ideal for
- CEOs, boards, and executive committees of incumbent businesses facing rule-changing competition.
- CSOs, heads of strategy, and transformation leads.
- Pharma, financial services, telecoms, consumer goods, and logistics leadership teams contending with cross-industry disruption.
- Senior leadership development programmes that want a serious strategy voice rather than a motivational one.
Audience outcomes
- A sharper account of how value is created and lost when industry rules are being rewritten.
- A working language for separating planning from strategic thinking inside their own executive team.
- Cross-sector patterns of disruption they can test against their own market.
- A clearer view of where current orthodoxies inside their organisation are quietly working against them.
- Specific provocations for the next board strategy conversation, not generic frameworks.
Talks
How senior leaders need to rethink strategic assumptions when industries are being reshaped by new entrants and new business models.
Key takeaways:
- Why sustained advantage assumptions are misleading boards
- The shift from planning system to thinking system
- Where incumbents typically misread game-changing competition
Why innovation inside large incumbents stalls, and how to treat it as a managed discipline rather than a cultural aspiration.
Key takeaways:
- The structural reasons corporate innovation underperforms
- How to govern innovation as a portfolio
- The role of senior leadership in setting innovation conditions
How to use partnerships and ecosystems as a route to value creation when single-firm advantage is no longer enough.
Key takeaways:
- Where collaboration creates value and where it destroys it
- Governance models for serious strategic partnerships
- Reading ecosystem dynamics inside your own industry