
Kaihan Krippendorff
Kaihan Krippendorff is a top strategy and innovation expert (both academically and as a practictioner), an author of 5 best selling books, a Thinkers50 recognized thinker, Fast Company blogger, and the founder of Outthinker -a strategy and innovation consulting firm that has generated $2.5B in new revenue for mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies.
Kaihan Krippendorff's Videos
What Kaihan Krippendorff's Clients Say
"Kaihan shows how large organizations, not just startups, can be a place where entrepreneurs innovate, build, and adapt for the future."
"Essential if you are itching to become more creative and tap into the resources of your company to create something amazing."
"Kaihan provides practical, actionable steps for breaking down siloes, and ignites the drive to collaborate and accept the new opportunities that will soon come your way."
"Kaihan, it was a pleasure to work with you. Your presentation at our annual partners meeting was engaging and thought-provoking. You left us all with a better understanding of innovation and actionable ideas we can start working on right away. Thanks again for how you customized your session; it felt like you were talking directly to us. Thank you!"
"I want to let you know that we were so thrilled and impressed with Kaihan and the content he delivered. Not only is he highly qualified and knowledgeable to speak about disruptive innovation, he is very personable both on stage and in his interactions with us. Kaihan is intelligent and insightful and it’s very clear to us that he is a lifelong learner who takes every opportunity to learn. We know that professional speakers often have “canned” presentations, but Kaihan took the time and effort to understand our company, partner CUs and the industry and in so doing was able to provide relevant and helpful insights into the “fourth option” that resonate and challenge the attendees to take action. Thank you for helping us secure Kaihan to speak EWF!"
"Kaihan was on-point and relevant. His message is current for any organization wanting to grow. He did a great job of creating a working environment during his talk in which he outlined specific steps and a process to think differently. I had immediate take-aways."
"Thank you for speaking at the CEO Roundtable! You really helped kick off the meeting and get the CEOs thinking. Several CEOs came up to me and told me they thought your presentation was excellent! Thank you for being so easy to work with and customizing the talk to make it just for our audience."
"Thank you for presenting at our Strategic Growth Conference! Your willingness to share your time and expertise was critical to the success of our event. We received terrific feedback and our attendees gained valuable insight from your presentation!"
"We really enjoyed working with Kaihan!!! His energy, topic, and being an outside speaker was really a breathe of fresh air and the perfect fit for the audience! We loved the takeaways connected to our leadership pillars and how easy and flexible he was to work with to customize for the event."
"Thanks for the excellent brief yesterday – I have already received anecdotal feedback how “on-point” and well-suited the content was for us. I appreciated your flexibility and personal engagement in particular."
"My clients and colleagues were very impressed with Kaihan’s speech and how much he knew so much about our industry and organization in a short amount of time. He was very well received. Thanks much for the excellent recommendation and your assistance."
"Kaihan- your talk was a perfect blend of inspiring, practical, and actionable. As a leader who is working to implement many of these ideas and structures, I found it so helpful to see a research-based, broader view of what successful innovation looks like! Thank you so much for the expertise and enthusiasm."
"We recently had Kaihan speak at our annual winter meeting to our council members. Not only was Kaihan’s presentation the most thought provoking and inspiring aspect of our meeting he was an absolute pleasure to work with leading up to the event. Kaihan spent extra time listening to us to learn more about our industry. His passion and enthusiasm came across extremely well to our audience. I would highly recommend Kaihan for your next event."
"Kaihan did a great job today! He was very effective in connecting the dots with his messaging and our strategy. I received several glowing comments on how well prepared he was and that his presentation and stories were very engaging. We couldn’t be happier!"
"Kaihan gave an amazing keynote presentation and helped make the event truly successful!"
"Great presentation this week at the Daikin Group Sales Meeting! Thank you for speaking with our reps, employees, and stakeholders to customize something just for us."
"Thanks for the excellent brief yesterday – I have already received anecdotal feedback how “on-point” and well-suited the content was for us. I appreciated your flexibility and personal engagement in particular."
"Kaihan is a great communicator, who held the rapt attention of an audience of more than 200 financial services professionals from across the country. He opened our minds, made us think, and gave us actionable ideas that one could apply to their day-to-day lives."
"Kaihan had over 700 business leaders captivated with his relevant content on how to build a business that disrupts your industry and distances yourself from your competition. He delivered!"
"Kaihan did a fantastic job at our annual conference for our many groups of CEOs and executive teams. His presentation energized the audience and left everyone with actionable tools and ideas for driving growth in their companies. He definitely made an impact."
"Kaihan really understood the key messages we were trying to get across to our Senior Leadership team. He incorporated those key messages around strategy and innovation into his speech, which was energizing, practical and impactful."
"Kaihan is a uniquely engaging speaker; he energizes and inspires. He uses cutting-edge business examples to make complex subjects simple, and offers the right balance of entertainment and deep insight."
"Kaihan, has an innate ability to captivate his audience. He brings a fresh, unique and passionate perspective on strategy and leadership, his style is brilliant and engaging and he is clearly a rising star."
"A fresh new approach of how to succeed in our highly uncertain business climate."
"Refreshing... speaks the truth. Many offer tools that might work. Kaihan offers tools that have been proven to work at the most innovative companies."
"Kaihan shows leaders how to ignite the curiosity, tenacity, initiative, and willingness to take risks your organization needs to innovate at scale. Listen to him if you want to maintain the dynamism and creativity the future demands."
"Kaihan inspires and empowers people broadly throughout the organization to sustain change and achieve agile and innovative growth."
"Stunningly engaging."
"Kaihan shows that with a bold idea, anyone can change the world."
"Kaihan Krippendorff breaks down the complex into relevant, practical, and actionable insights that engage, entertain, and inspire your audience."
"Startups get the headlines, but established companies are often the real innovation heroes. Kaihan shares tools and practical examples that help internal innovators combine entrepreneurial energy with assets of scale to innovate with impact."
"Kaihan is very good at understanding the underlying patterns of strategy, then he trains the group to start recognizing these patterns, with time the strategic level of the group starts rising, generating breakthrough ideas that unleash untapped value."
"Kaihan’s groundbreaking work on strategy development changes the game for organizations facing an increasingly competitive environment."
"Kaihan has the unique ability to frame questions in such a way that energizes a diverse group of leaders in strategic business planning. Through his guidance we were able to look at strategic issues for our board in unique ways that will have immediate application. He was quick to understand our issues and our mission and was an immense help in developing our strategy."
"Kaihan provides practical methods to systematically analyze and intelligently manage the competition. This does not mean copying or even responding to the competition. It means precisely the opposite."
"We’ve exposed thousands of executives of growth firms around the world to Kaihan Krippendorff’s concrete and practical stratagems for dealing with competitive threats and he’s been universally well received by our tough and discerning audiences."
"Kaihan’s fresh message opens minds and motivates strategic change in a new era of competition that demands change."
"We invited Kaihan to address a global body of our top talent. He delivers cutting edge business concepts with his own unique tools in a way that inspires leaders to think differently. His professional approach, innovative concepts and deep knowledge of strategy holds up against the most sophisticated and experienced audiences."
"Kaihan’s speech for the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) left us inspired and wanting to change the world."
"We have had outstanding feedback from Kaihan's sessions [at IMEX Frankfurt] and it was an honour to have him take part."
"Kaihan’s presentation was excellent, and highly rated by our membership. Not only did he educate and inspire us, but he left us with an actual framework to follow and engage our teams."
"Kaihan shares a toolset and process companies and employees can leverage to bring ideas, both incremental and transformative, to fruition, to change the world and create a better future.”"
"Kaihan did an outstanding job as an external speaker at our Leadership Conference. He made a concerted effort to make his message tailored to our audience and went above and beyond in terms of learning about the issues that our company and its leaders are currently facing. I was impressed by his use of stories or choosing examples very relevant to our leaders to tie into his themes. We have gotten a lot of positive feedback regarding his message and would recommend him for additional talks."
"Kaihan, Your contributions to UTC over the years to think through strategy and opportunities for innovation are highly impactful!"
"Kaihan delivered a great presentation. The team really enjoyed it and it was highly relevant."
"Kaihan was responsive to tailoring his talk to the audience – was VERY relatable – one of our very best lectures and best-received lectures by the diverse audience of students, faculty, staff, people from the community. A top-notch and interactive speaker whose ideas resonate with almost any audience. PLUS – he’s a pleasure to work with as a person. Can’t say enough good things about him."
"In January of 2020, the Center for Leadership had Kaihan Krippendorff speak as part of The Leadership Lectures series at Florida International University. Not only was he well received by the audience, he was also easy to work with, personable and spent extra time answering questions our attendees had at the end of his presentation. His high energy, enthusiasm, relevant content and invaluable insights were amazing. The delivery of his message was exemplary as it resonated among our students as much as it did our faculty/staff and community members. The audience left feeling excited and motivated. I would highly recommend Mr. Krippendorff as a speaker for your next event, you won’t be disappointed."
"Any time I can be part of Kaihan Krippendorff's events I gladly join."
"Thank you for a great presentation! Our members and I will be looking to apply your principles to our own businesses in 2021. Well done!"
"A huge thank you for your outstanding keynote sessions at our 2021 Leaders Conference. The participant survey results show that your message resonated with our audience and you received an 87% satisfaction rating (with 49% extremely satisfied). We are very pleased with these results and our experience working with you to plan the sessions. Please accept our sincere appreciation for helping to make our conference a success!"
"Kaihan provides the guide that any business, government, and organizations should use to ignite innovation from the bottom up."
"Thank you SO much for such a wonderful session. That was truly energizing and I am already being flooded with notes, Slacks, email, and DMs from our team noting how much they enjoyed your session."
"Kaihan, your content and presentation was excellent! Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to share your insights with the ML team. There was really good attendance and engagement. Our folks will surely benefit."
"Thank YOU so much, Kaihan! It was such a fantastic session today. I know I learned so much and some of our members were sharing that it was their favorite session from the entire EO Summer School thus far. You shared a lot of practical advice for them to not only get through COVID, but to think about ways to grow their businesses and come out stronger on the other side. Excellent content and very engaging virtual delivery too! Thanks again!"
"Kaihan continually inspires me, right where strategy intersects innovation. At the same time, he practices what he preaches, building a social learning community, showing us a new model in his own business. Pioneer!"
"Kaihan is truly an extraordinary, world-class thinker, strategist and disruptive innovation practitioner. His books and talks demonstrate his ability to sense and elevate trends and disruptive forces when they are still fringe, to use his vast strategic understanding and cross-industry experience to clearly illuminate unheard-of but potent INSIGHTS (e.g., keys to driving large-scale innovation in companies through engaging employees) and a remarkable ability to ACTIVATE those insights in ways that resonate with practitioners in the field who struggle with transforming theory into action. His ability to drive clarity and offer actionable frameworks and approaches is unparalleled. And his ability to 'connect the dots' across his vast network of other leading thinkers (see his OUTTHINKER podcast), and his ability to facilitate on-the-ground feedback from strategists in industry (I am part of his OUTTHINKER network) is truly exemplary. I gain meaningful, novel insights in each of my interactions with Kaihan, and the forums he leads -- these have been pivotal in shaping work I do and initiatives I spearhead as Chief Strategy Officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Finally, Kaihan's style is equally extraordinary -- he is exceptionally sincere, humble and inviting of others' perspectives and creates an inspiring and engaging forum for others. Having had the pleasure of working with many brilliant minds in the past both as a partner at Oliver Wyman, and at Harvard Business School, I can say unreservedly that Kaihan is 'tops' in my book."
Available for
Languages:
- English
Kaihan Krippendorff's 2025 Biography
Meet Kaihan Krippendorff
Kaihan Krippendorff is the founder of Outthinker Networks, a global think-tank of chief strategy, innovation, growth, and transformation officers and executives of large global public and private organizations.
A former McKinsey consultant and author of bestselling books including Outthink the Competition, Driving Innovation from Within, and Proximity, Kaihan is recognized by Thinkers50 and Global Gurus as one of the top 20 global management thinkers in strategy and innovation.
Known for rigorously researched tools and engaging programs, Kaihan is an innovation catalyst and sought-after strategic advisor for some of the world’s most recognizable companies including Aetna-CVS, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Yahoo!. His work has created in excess of $3.0 billion in new annual recurring revenue.
Kaihan is host of the Outthinkers podcast, The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast, and Strategy at Scale podcast. His ideas are frequently published in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and other leading media outlets. He teaches strategy and innovation for Wharton Executive Education, Florida International University, NYU, and other programs across the globe. Kaihan is an advisory board member of two technology startups.
Kaihan holds a doctorate in strategy and business and engineering degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, Wharton, Columbia Business School, and London Business School. With a mother from Bangladesh, father from Germany, and wife from Latin America, Kaihan is a global citizen who brings a holistic, diverse, and worldly perspective to everything he does. He is a passionate cook and lives in Miami, Florida, with his wife, three teenage kids, two cats, and a dog.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has said, “Kaihan shows that with a compelling idea anyone can change the world” and that message has made Kaihan one of the most sought-after business speakers in the world.
Kaihan Krippendorff's 2025 Talks & Topics
“Times of change separate thinkers from Outthinkers. And we get to choose. It creates an opportunity to rethink business as usual and set ourselves apart from the competition.”
We live in an accelerated age of technology, disruption, volatility, and uncertainty. It demands that we lead our teams and organizations in radically new ways. Success depends not only on our own ability to think and act strategically, but on our ability to enable our team to think boldly, think differently, share ideas, and act.
Leaders who activate this Outthinker Mindset and provide their people with the structures, frameworks, and tools to creatively solve challenges and innovate are 6X more likely to recruit and retain top talent and 3X more likely to outperform financially (faster revenue growth, higher profit margins, higher business value).
How do you do this? In this interactive keynote, globally recognized management thinker and author Kaihan Krippendorff lays out a practical, proven process and set of tools your people can apply immediately to move to the next level of success. This program incorporates key ideas from two of his top-selling books, Outthink the Competition and Driving Innovation from Within.
The audience will leave with and learn:
- Insights into the emerging strategic technology, trends, and approaches successful companies are using to win in their markets
- The Outthinker Process: A proven framework to drive growth
- The 5 most important Outthinker mindsets for success (customized for YOUR industry and company)
- Energized, with a common language and tools to help you move on your agenda
This program can be delivered as a keynote, keynote & breakout workshop, or a half to full day workshop. The program is for leaders & teams who want to:
- Deliver top and bottom line growth
- Overcome heavy competition and disruptors
- Develop a common language and learn a repeatable process to unleash creative thinking and drive innovation
- Keep up with the pace of change
“The idea that innovation comes only from startups and entrepreneurs is a myth. Employee innovators, also known as Intrapreneurs, are responsible for 70% of the most transformative innovations of the past three decades.”
In our accelerated world of technology and disruption, the benefits of turning employees into innovators is well documented. Companies that treat their people as “Intrapreneurs” (corporate innovators) are building a competitive advantage that infuses innovation and adaptability into their DNA. Transformation becomes a toned muscle and capability that can be exercised repeatedly as needed. Best-selling author and globally ranked innovation expert Kaihan Krippendorff’s research shows companies with active Intrapreneur networks are 3X more likely to be in the top quintile of financial performance and enjoy a 6X advantage in their ability to recruit and retain top talent.
The IN-OVATE framework provides a specific and practical approach to turn your employees into Intrapreneurs and build capacity for enterprise-wide transformation and smart innovation.
In this inspiring and high-impact keynote (customized for your event), Kaihan shows how organizations can unlock the power of Intrapreneurship, and how you, the individual Intrapreneur, can navigate barriers, overcome resistance, and take the initiative to drive transformation across your organization.
The audience will leave with and learn:
- A framework to overcome the seven blockers of innovation
- Five mindsets and habits of successful Intrapreneurs
- How to innovate even if it is not a part of their title
- Inspired and energized to think differently, take smart risks, learn, and improve
This program can be delivered as a keynote, keynote & breakout workshop, or a half to full day workshop. The program is for leaders & teams who want to:
- Motivate and enable people to be more innovative
- Move from a culture of permissionseeking to a culture of proactivity
- Spark creativity and new thinking
- Gain traction or accelerate transformation
- Uncover opportunities for growth and differentiation
“All of the trends and shocks we are struggling with, from AI and digitalization to sustainability and geopolitical uncertainty, make sense when you look at it through the lens of Proximity.”
In a world of constant disruption, technological change, and megatrend turbulence, how do we transform the way we lead and work? The answer is Proximity – a simple idea that you can use to turn disruptors like artificial intelligence, renewable energy, virtual reality, 3D printing, and new ways of working into possibilities…chaos into clarity.
Based on globally renowned management thinker Kaihan Krippendorff’s new book, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life, this high-impact keynote will arm leaders with a Proximity Roadmap for their industry and adjacent ones. Ignite a new mental mindset and give your audience the practical tools needed to be bold and shape the future.
The audience will leave with and learn:
- Understand the impact that matters for your business of megatrends and disruptors like generative AI, 3D printing, precision-agriculture, dark factories, and renewable energy – and how to harness them to drive growth and resiliency
- Build your Proximity roadmap, three steps to winning the future
- Prepare your organization and people with the mindsets needed to lead
Map out where you need to rethink growth plans, innovation and investments, operations, and customer expectations
This program can be delivered as a keynote, keynote & breakout workshop, or a half to full day workshop. The program is for leaders & teams who want to:
- Be prepared to navigate and ride the waves caused by disruptive technologies
- Be the disruptor, not the disrupted
- Set their company up for continued growth and success
- Spark creative and innovative thinking in their organization
When we say “innovation” we almost always mean “product innovation.” We talk about research & development and possible new solutions to meet unmet needs. This is a one-dimensional and incomplete approach to innovation. Dissect the most innovative companies of the last decade and you will see that great innovators disrupt their markets by reaching beyond the product. Oftentimes their success rests on choices that have little to do with new products.
In this presentation, successful entrepreneur, author, consultant, and CEO Kaihan Krippendorff will take you through engaging examples from a broad array of industries (as well as your own) such as Urban Outfitters in apparel, IKEA in furniture, VMware in technology, SpaceX in space launch vehicles, Mastercard in payments, and Vistaprint in printing services, showing how companies that outperform their competition seek disruptive innovation across eight dimensions (8Ps). The “8Ps” framework has proven to be a powerful structure to engage high-level marketers, business strategists and sales staff in an exploration of where competitive advantages lie, where to strengthen them, and where they are being underutilized. Learnings from this session include:
- The “8Ps” strategic innovation framework: systematically uncover new avenues for growth, innovation, and transformation
- Positioning
- Product/service mix
- Pricing/fees
- Placement/delivery
- Promotion/client acquisition
- Processes/operations
- Physical experience
- People
- How to construct a disruptive business model or strategy that leverages an underutilized 8P strength
- Identifying opportunities beyond the R&D lab: identify and reconstruct processes and operations to drive efficiency
- Driving organic growth leveraging the value of unrealized ideas
- How to build real confidence to apply new strategies everyday across all business units and roles
In a world marked by accelerated change and innovation, mental agility has proven to be a critical driver of success in sports, warfare, business, career, and life. Yet few agree on what exactly “mental agility” is or know how to develop it. Companies that fail to move on quickly enough from their linear organization will not succeed. In this presentation, successful entrepreneur, author, consultant and CEO Kaihan Krippendorff shares insights from his work with top-level corporate entrepreneurs and the study of more than 200 successful innovators into what sets them apart from the rest of the competitive pack. Kaihan will share the key practices that distinguish those with high mental agility and arm the audience with tools and frameworks they can immediately apply to their own work. Audience members will learn to:
- Connect the unconnected – pulling together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to rapidly form a mental image of the situation or opportunity.
- Uncover unexpected causes – drilling down into the system to see the cause others overlook.
- Shift your frame – shifting your frame on the problem to reveal solutions others dismiss.
- Empower and inspire your employees so that they are ready to take action to develop, test and scale innovative growth ideas
- Question the impossible – understanding why we fall into mental “traps” of false beliefs that prevent us from seeing what is possible and, more importantly, how to dig out of the trap that is keeping you from seizing the solution.
- Attendees will leave with a boost of confidence, tools, and energy to increase the velocity and agility level of their organization on a daily basis.
The financial services industry – from banking to payments to insurance – is undergoing a rapid and historic transformation. The shifting regulatory landscape, changing consumer/investor behavior, an endless stream of agile newcomers armed with disruptive fintech tools, and platforms powered by Blockchain and AI are mounting an attack on incumbent institutions and business models. Kaihan Krippendorff works with many of the world’s leading financial institutions, helping them make sense of this uncertain future – understanding key future trends and technologies, designing fresh strategies and agile teams ready to face disruption head on so their organization can be ready to transform, compete, and win the future of finance. A successful entrepreneur, author, consultant and CEO that has created more than $2.5B in revenue for clients, Kaihan uses first-hand experience and actionable insights to present a compelling vision of the future world of financial services, arming the audience with a framework and tools that they can use to succeed in the tech-driven digital economy of the 21st century.
You will learn:
- The key trends shaping the financial services industry – Blockchain, AI, regulatory environment, unbundling/bundling, millennial investors, fintech, financial inclusion and beyond
- What financial services will look like in the near and distant future
- Five key strategies today’s most successful firms are adopting to adapt to, and lead, tomorrow
- How to transform into a more agile, inspiring, disruptive competitor, built for success in the digital economy
- Tools and a process for developing concrete ideas and strategic approaches that could disrupt the industry
Historically, we were taught corporations existed for one purpose: to maximize shareholder value. But companies are waking up to the realization that such a focus destroys shareholder value over the long term because it creates resistance to your growth.
Successful entrepreneur, author, consultant and CEO Kaihan Krippendorff draws on years of proprietary research to show that today’s most successful companies more often speak of the strategic power of appealing to all stakeholders. If you design a strategy that benefits shareholders by also benefiting employees, the community, the country, and the environment, you have designed the ultimate strategy. When everyone wants you to win, you remove all competition. This idea goes beyond social responsibility. It points us toward removing the idea that doing good and making profit are inconsistent. You do not have to choose.
By pulling together inspiring stories from organizations ranging from lesser-known jewels like Best Doctors, BrightFarms, and Holstee to leading socially directed corporations like IKEA, Mastercard, and Target, Kaihan will inspire and motivate the audience to rethink their role and how they interact with stakeholders, not just shareholders. The audience will learn:
- The three primary goals of a “be good” socially minded strategy
- Simple yet effective tools and frameworks to apply and create your own “Do Good” strategy that complements your current organizational strengths and strategy
- The next evolution of corporate social responsibility and how to embrace the shift toward a future where CSR is the norm
- How to empower and inspire employees so that they’re ready to take action to develop ideas, strategies, products, and programs that everyone benefits from
Kaihan Krippendorff's Latest Books

Outthink the Competition: How Innovative Companies and Strategists See Options Others Ignore
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