David S. Kidder
Established companies are built to run the core, not to discover the next one. The instinct under pressure is to optimise what already exists, which is exactly when a rival builds the thing that replaces you. The hard problem is not having ideas. It is installing a repeatable way to find, test, and fund new growth without breaking the business that pays the bills.
David S. Kidder helps established companies build new growth as a repeatable system, drawing on the GrowthOS methodology he created at Bionic and deployed across more than forty Fortune 500 organisations before Accenture acquired it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with David S. Kidder
- He hands leadership teams a named, tested method for growth, the GrowthOS, rather than inspiration. Accenture bought the company built around it, and Fortune 500 partners including Nike, P&G, Citi, and GE ran it inside their own businesses.
- His work targets the specific failure mode of large firms: they grow existing businesses well but rarely turn new opportunities into meaningful revenue. He gives leaders a way to do the second thing without abandoning the first.
- The methodology is published and taught, not proprietary folklore. New to Big set out the Growth Operating System in full, and the approach has been used as teaching material on enterprise growth and innovation.
- He works from the operator’s chair, not the lectern. He built Bionic to $30 million in revenue and sold four companies, so his frameworks come with the scar tissue of having run them under real commercial pressure.
- His current systems, PreMortem and Apogee, extend the same logic into decision discipline: surfacing the two or three assumptions that decide whether a funded initiative actually succeeds, before more capital is committed.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and CEO of Bionic, the enterprise-growth firm acquired by Accenture in 2021 and folded into what became Accenture Song
- Creator of the GrowthOS, deployed with CEOs and leadership teams at Nike, Procter & Gamble, Citi, GE, and more than forty other Fortune 500 organisations
- Co-author of New to Big (Currency, 2019) with Christina Wallace, endorsed by Clay Christensen, Adam Grant, and Marc Andreessen
- Creator and co-author of The Intellectual Devotional, a New York Times bestselling series; his books have sold more than one million copies across 18 languages
- Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (2008) and recipient of ID Magazine’s International Design Award; graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology
- Angel investor in more than 150 startups, with early positions including SpaceX and Airbnb
Biography
Large companies are good at making big businesses bigger. They are far worse at turning a new idea into a business that matters, which is the skill entrepreneurs and venture investors live by. David S. Kidder built his career on closing that gap.
At Bionic, the company he co-founded and led as CEO, Kidder created the GrowthOS: a system that borrows the tools and mindsets of venture capital and installs them inside established organisations. He deployed it directly with leadership teams at Nike, Procter & Gamble, Citi, GE, and more than forty other Fortune 500 firms, and bootstrapped the company to $30 million in revenue before Accenture acquired it in 2021 and made the method a core part of Accenture Song.
The thinking is set out in New to Big, written with Christina Wallace and endorsed by Clay Christensen, Adam Grant, and Marc Andreessen. Its argument is practical: stop guessing from the inside out, obsess over the customer problems that create real opportunity, run growth as a portfolio, and treat productive failure as information. His earlier books, including the New York Times bestselling Intellectual Devotional series, have sold more than a million copies across 18 languages.
Kidder now applies the same discipline to the moment before capital is committed. PreMortem is a decision system that forces teams to name the assumptions underneath their highest-stakes initiatives and test the two or three that decide the outcome. Apogee, rooted in behavioural science, works on how leadership teams commit to each other and hold the line on those commitments. Both come from the same conviction that runs through his four exits: growth is not luck, it is a system you can build and run.
Key speaking topics
- Enterprise growth systems and the GrowthOS
- New business-model discovery inside established companies
- Innovation as a repeatable, portfolio-based discipline
- Commercial decision-making and assumption testing under uncertainty
- Corporate reinvention and the founder’s mindset at scale
- Leadership-team performance and accountability
Ideal for
- CEOs, CSOs, and chief growth or innovation officers at large enterprises trying to build new revenue without disrupting the core business
- Boards and executive teams with a fully funded, high-stakes initiative they cannot confidently say is on course
- PE and VC portfolio companies under pressure to accelerate new revenue and prove repeatable growth
- CHROs and people leaders responsible for turning leadership development into visible behaviour change
Audience outcomes
- A shared framework for identifying where genuine new growth lives and a clear first move for pursuing it
- The specific two or three assumptions that will decide whether a major initiative succeeds, and a plan to test them before more capital goes in
- A working understanding of how to run innovation as a governed portfolio rather than a series of one-off bets
- A concrete practice for leadership teams to make visible commitments and hold each other accountable to them
- Language and mental models that separate a real growth engine from activity that only looks like progress
Talks
Shows leadership teams how established organisations discover and build their next engine of revenue without abandoning the core business.
Key takeaways:
- How to shift from inside-out assumptions about existing markets to an outside-in focus on the customer problems that create opportunity
- The system behind discovering, validating, and capturing new growth, drawn from deploying the GrowthOS across 40+ Fortune 500 organisations
- A shared framework for identifying where real growth lives and a clear first move to pursue it
Helps leadership teams expose and resolve the untested assumptions underneath their most critical funded initiatives.
Key takeaways:
- How to surface the hidden risks in a high-stakes initiative that rarely get named out loud
- How to pressure-test the assumptions driving a strategy and align on what must be true for it to succeed
- The two or three assumptions that decide success or failure, and a plan to test them before more capital is committed
Introduces a behavioural-science system for how leadership teams show up, hold each other accountable, and build collective performance.
Key takeaways:
- The Board Effect: an identity-level shift where leaders make specific, visible commitments to peers who hold them accountable
- How abstract leadership goals become measurable behaviour change a team can see and sustain
- A practice a team can begin using immediately and run on its own within 90 days