Taddy Hall

Videos

Taddy Hall - Competing Against Luck
Taddy Hall - Endeavor Peru Conference - May 2020
3 Strategies for Building a Successful, Sustainable Growth Company in the Face of Relentless Change
Taddy Hall | The Causal Mechanism of Successful Innovation
Customer of the Future: What’s next for innovation with John Marshall and Taddy Hall
Competing Against Luck - Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon and Taddy Hall

Learn More About Taddy Hall

In a world of accelerating change, new mindsets and skillsets are required to design and deploy growth engines that lead an organization into the future. Taddy Hall, senior partner at the global creative agency Lippincott, has lived, breathed and consulted on marketing, growth and innovation for his entire career. His rich research, coupled with his real-world consulting and advising expertise, has honed a proven framework for making innovation predictive – and improving its outcomes.

For more than two decades, Hall has coached entrepreneurs in emerging markets, consulted with corporate leaders facing existential growth challenges, and advised heads of state to spur market-creating innovation — giving each the mindset and toolset to unleash growth. “Most leaders approach innovation and growth the wrong way,” he explains. “Rather than looking for the white space in the market, they need to find the white space in people’s lives. Meaningful opportunities are tapped by creating new markets – not stealing share.” Through high-energy keynotes, Hall inspires new ways of thinking about the future, while his in-depth executive workshops immerse leaders in innovation-based approaches to growth. Drawing from extensive marketing experience, Hall also helps audiences of all levels and across every business better understand how consumers make buying decisions. Highlighting case stories from companies as diverse as Intuit, Barclays UK, Virgin, SNHU, Chobani and others, Hall offers leaders actionable insights and provides strategic guidance for what they must do to thrive in the near term while simultaneously creating a future that is different from the past.

Formerly, Hall was the principal at growth strategy consultancy The Cambridge Group, which is part of The Nielsen Company. From 2012-2016, he was the primary author of the annual “U.S. Nielsen Breakthrough Innovation Reports,” known as the ultimate marketer’s guide to innovating and improving performance in a crowded marketplace. He also headed the company’s Breakthrough Innovation Project and led its global expansion.

For 15 years, Hall collaborated with the late Harvard Business School Professor and global innovation authority Clayton Christensen, including on the publication of “The Innovator’s Solution” (2003) and “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” (2005). “Competing Against Luck” (Harper Collins, 2016), their book co-authored with Karen Dillon and David Duncan, digs deep into the science of innovation and Professor Christensen’s influential Jobs to be Done theory. By understanding what causes customers to “hire” a product or service, a business can improve its innovation track record, and make innovation more predictable and scalable. The book, which continues to prove its worth as an influential resource for leading executives across the world, will soon be available in Korean and Chinese.

Especially knowledgeable in and passionate about innovation in emerging markets, Hall partnered with the late Professor Christensen and Ann Christensen to co-found Innovation Without Borders™, which delivers their unique innovation tools and frameworks to senior executives and entrepreneurs in rising regions of the world, including such countries as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Peru and the Philippines. Since 1997, Hall also actively advises a network of 1000+ emerging market chief executives to build profitable growth companies through the Endeavor organization.

An engaging advisor, speaker and writer, Hall has published articles on innovation in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, Huffington Post, Time, Business Insider, Chief Executive and CMO magazine. He also co-authored “The Online Advertising Playbook,” published by Wiley in 2007.

Prior to joining Nielsen, Hall served as chief operating officer at Meteor Solutions, a leading social media analytics and marketing company. From 2003-2008, he was chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation, where he leveraged deep expertise in media, digital technologies and research methodologies to help senior executives succeed in challenging competitive contexts.

Hall started his career in venture capital/private equity, working for Advent International, both in the U.S. and Latin America. He then transitioned from finance to operations, managing five venture-backed businesses – four of them technology/internet related, and one with retail, manufacturing and real estate development units. Hall holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University. At Harvard, he worked as an independent researcher with professor, competitive strategy mentor and renowned economist Michael E. Porter to develop and implement strategies for competitive inner-city economies.

Taddy Hall is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.

The New Growth Engine for Innovation

Most companies think about and go about innovation and growth in the wrong way—relying on current business models to make incremental improvements to existing products. But what got you here won’t get you much further, says Taddy Hall. Looking for white space in the market is no longer enough; he explains why and discusses how to build future-proofed capabilities, separate from the legacy profit models that created today’s success. Hall points to real-world companies doing it right (and wrong) and presents his proven innovation-based growth engine methodology for amassing new resources, establishing new processes and using different governance systems.

5 Questions Growth-oriented CEOs Need to Answer

Too many leaders answer the basic questions – such as “What business are we in?” – incorrectly, errors that prove costly in terms of lost opportunity and wasted investment. The accelerating pace of change only raises the stakes of getting the answers right. According to Taddy Hall, getting the right answers to five key questions can make the difference between growth and stagnation in an era of accelerating change. The secret, he says, is to unleash “market-creating innovations.” From decades of research and client work as a consultant, Hall reveals that most companies excel at sustaining innovation – incremental improvements to existing offerings – as well as efficiency innovation – taking cost out of the current business model. However, growth and enduring advantage accrue to the leaders who master the mindset and activate the toolset of market-creating innovations.

The Customer of the Future: The 6 Big Shifts That Affect All Businesses—Including Yours

The customer experience is in the throes of disruption; it’s never been more important and it’s shifting fast. Technology is changing how people connect, create, escape, accomplish, work, unwind, understand, stand out, fit in, get fit, learn, earn money, spend money and simply live. Your customer of the not-so-distant future? She doesn’t know how to drive, but she drives all the time. She’s never been to the doctor, but she visits her doctor every week. She never logs on, but she’s always online. She’s always shopping, but she’s never in line. Her tattoo unlocks her car. Her manager is a robot. We’re living in a whole new world. Taddy Hall unpacks the six big shifts changing the way companies operate and consumers buy within this new technological landscape and discusses how to implement strategies. The implications for every business in every industry are profound—raising critical questions about what brands need to do differently and how their business models need to change to stay relevant to their customers now and tomorrow.

Growth, Brands and Customer Experience: How Technology is Changing the Game of Customer Expectations and Business Requirements

Customers buy experiences not products, and 95% of executives agree. However, while 80% of executives believe they’re doing a good job of delivering, only 8% of customers share this view. What are the secrets to leveraging data and technology to deliver winning customer experiences? The answer, Taddy Hall argues, is for executives to balance their use of technology for gaining operating efficiencies with an equal commitment to deploy technology to improve customer experience. In this talk, Hall reveals that by redefining the essential unit of innovation work from “product attribute” to “customer experience,” the dimensions of the offering that need to be added or adjusted come into clear focus. This perspective shift enables managers to simultaneously de-risk and accelerate successful innovation outcomes.

What Customers Want: Future-Proofing Financial Services Through Innovation

Although most financial institutions have embraced the need to digitize and optimize processes and products, there are cracks now appearing from how customers are using (or not using) their digital offerings. For example, nearly every major bank has set up a digital bank, essentially taking their existing models and converting them to a digital backbone. But most of these efforts have failed. It turns out, customers aren’t only looking for tech-powered efficiencies. Taddy Hall explains why and discusses how financial services should instead think about and implement innovation to meet the needs of customers, today and in the future. Using real-world examples, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Money, Hall presents groundbreaking research that takes a closer look at people’s relationships with money. It’s not about finding the white space in the market, he says. It’s about looking for the white space in people’s lives.

Breakthrough Leadership: How Senior Leaders Enable – and Unwittingly Impede – Innovation

Leadership is a tricky topic, and one all too easily wrapped in platitudes and empty slogans. Yet, in our study of successful innovation initiatives, we find that the role of senior leadership is powerfully present in virtually every instance, says Taddy Hall. In fact, the only exceptions were cases in which a manager made a career-jeopardizing decision to flout the established incentives, process protocols, and direct instructions of superiors. Innovation should not require acts of heroism or genius. There are specific activities that must be rigorously managed – not simply proclaimed and delegated – from the C-suite. Hall helps chief executives who desire consistently successful innovation outcomes understand why mastering and performing these non-transferable duties is essential for sustained profitable growth.

How to Build Winning, Enduring Brands

Taddy Hall believes branding and innovation are inextricably linked. The way to bring innovative brands to life, he argues, is by making them meaningful “go-to brands” – brands we love for how they relate to us and help us do what we previously could not. As Hall’s research shows, go-to brands build meaning by creating a genuine connection to the consumer and enabling customers to achieve progress. In this presentation, filled with clear, actionable implications for C-suite leaders, marketers and investors, Hall illustrates the power of applying the Jobs To Be Done theory to a product or service development and deployment strategy, and reveals how successful brands – those that deliver 5X better financial outcomes – make meaningful progress and establish deep connection with their target customers.

Navigate with Confidence: Innovation in Emerging Markets

Managers in emerging markets enjoy the riches of innovator’s gold: non-consumers. While firms in mature markets are often forced to wage trench warfare over zero sum contests, innovators in emerging markets find many more greenfield opportunities to create industries where only inadequate or nonexistent options existed previously. Success, however, requires the ability to see what is not there, says Taddy Hall. Managers trained to measure consumption will find their data sets and analytical tools unhelpful to the market-creator’s challenge. Having lived in emerging markets for several years and advised executives for more than two decades, Hall blends rich personal experience with robust theory – most notably Jobs to be Done and disruption – to enable leaders to navigate uncharted terrain with confidence. A master implementer of innovation strategies, he offers his audiences not only the right toolset but also the mindset needed to innovate in today’s most challenging environments.