Lisa Bodell
Most large organisations are drowning in their own processes. Meetings, reports, approvals and rules accumulate faster than anyone removes them, and the cost is not just time, it is the disappearance of space to think, decide and innovate. Leaders keep adding initiatives on top of a system that is already saturated, then wonder why nothing moves.
Lisa Bodell helps organisations strip out the meetings, rules and busywork that suffocate innovation, and is the founder of FutureThink and author of Why Simple Wins and Kill the Company.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lisa Bodell
- She attacks the root cause most innovation programmes ignore. Her thesis is that complexity, not a lack of ideas, is what stops large companies from changing.
- She brings a tested operational toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run inside the business the week after the keynote.
- Her client list runs through hard-to-move organisations such as Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup, where the simplification argument has to survive contact with regulated, matrixed environments.
- Her two Routledge books, Kill the Company (Axiom Best Business Book Award, 2014) and Why Simple Wins, give leadership teams a shared language and a structured method that outlasts the session.
- She is a working operator, not only a writer. She has run FutureThink for more than two decades and writes monthly for Forbes, so the material is being pressure-tested in the field continuously.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of FutureThink, an innovation and simplification training firm working with global enterprise clients since 2003.
- Author of Why Simple Wins (Routledge) and Kill the Company (Routledge / Bibliomotion), the latter an Axiom Best Business Book Award winner.
- Monthly contributor to Forbes; quoted or published in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, FOX News and CNN.
- TEDxNormal speaker, “How Simplification is the Key to Change”.
- Named to the Forbes “50 Leading Female Futurists” list in 2020.
- Has taught innovation at American University and Fordham University, and worked with clients including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Google, SAP and Citigroup.
Biography
Most innovation problems inside large companies are not idea problems. The pipeline is full. The strategy decks exist. What is missing is room to act on any of it, because calendars, approval chains and legacy rules have absorbed the working week. This is the territory Lisa Bodell has built a career on.
She is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, which she launched in 2003 to do something narrower and more useful than most innovation consulting. Rather than add another framework, FutureThink helps leadership teams remove. Remove low-value meetings, remove obsolete rules, remove the tasks that consume capacity without producing decisions. The argument is that simplification is the precondition for innovation, not a side benefit.
That argument runs through her two books with Routledge, Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins. Kill the Company, which won the 2014 Axiom Best Business Book Award, is built around a simple inversion: instead of asking how to grow, ask how a competitor would put you out of business, and act on the answer. Why Simple Wins extends the method into a practical toolkit for stripping out the work that does not matter, with exercises like “Kill a Stupid Rule” that have been used inside companies including Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg and Google.
Bodell writes monthly for Forbes and has been featured in Fast Company, WIRED, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg Businessweek. Forbes named her to its 2020 list of 50 Leading Female Futurists. The reason senior teams keep booking her is narrower than that profile suggests. She gives leaders a defensible reason, and a method, for taking things off the plate.
Key speaking topics
- Organisational simplification
- Innovation and disruption
- Killing complexity in large organisations
- Future of work and ways of working
- Change and culture transformation
- Provocative questioning as a leadership tool
- Creating capacity for higher-value work
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams trying to free up capacity inside complex, matrixed organisations.
- Chief Strategy, Transformation and Innovation Officers running enterprise-wide change programmes.
- Operations and HR leaders auditing meetings, rules and processes that no longer earn their place.
- Leadership offsites and innovation summits where the brief is to provoke, not to inform.
Audience outcomes
- A direct case for treating complexity, not idea generation, as the binding constraint on innovation.
- A set of named exercises, including “Kill a Stupid Rule” and the Why Simple Wins toolkit, that teams can run on Monday morning.
- A sharper question set for leadership meetings, modelled on the Kill the Company method.
- A shared language for distinguishing low-value busywork from work that produces decisions and outcomes.
- Permission, from a credible outside voice, to remove rather than add.
Talks
A keynote arguing that complexity is the binding constraint on innovation in large organisations and showing how to dismantle it.
Key takeaways:
- Why most performance and innovation problems trace back to process and rule accumulation, not strategy.
- The Why Simple Wins toolkit, including the “Kill a Stupid Rule” exercise.
- A practical filter for separating valuable work from organisational noise.
A working session for leadership teams on how to operationalise simplification across functions and geographies.
Key takeaways:
- How to audit meetings, approvals and reports for actual contribution to decisions.
- How to embed simplification into operating rhythms rather than treating it as a one-off campaign.
- The leadership behaviours that protect, or quietly undo, simplification work.
A keynote on how organisational habits suppress creative problem-solving, and what leaders can do to change that pattern.
Key takeaways:
- The Kill the Company exercise as a method for surfacing real strategic risk.
- How provocative questions outperform brainstorming in regulated and matrixed environments.
- What leaders need to stop doing for innovation behaviour to take hold.