Big Bet Leadership with John Rossman

Thinkers & Ideas

In Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, John Rossman provides a playbook for becoming an innovation and transformation winner.

Rossman was previously an executive at Amazon, responsible for launching their Marketplace business. Now, he is the managing partner of Rossman Partners, advising leading enterprises on large-scale change, and author of the best-selling books The Amazon Way and Think Like Amazon. In his latest book, he examines why high-stakes change efforts fail and how to frame and manage them more effectively. Companies need to think in terms of “big bets,” which will require executives to adopt the right mindset, tactical steps, and leadership habits.

In his conversation with Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Rossman explains why we need to work in prose, not in PowerPoint; how to think big, while betting small; and how to make the critical decisions to “continue, pivot, or kill” a project.

Key topics discussed:

01:19 | What makes a “big bet”

04:10 | Thinking in outcomes

06:49 | Prose over PowerPoint

12:51 | Thinking big, but betting small

16:21 | Thinking in systems

19:21 | How to decide to “continue, pivot, or kill” – and avoid confusion

22:45 | Where “big bet” thinking can be applied

Additional inspirations from John Rossman:

• The Amazon Way: Amazon's 14 Leadership Principles (Clyde Hill Publishing, 2021)
• Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader (McGraw Hill, 2019)

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
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