One of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions in business today is that the leaders who drive the most innovation-led growth are the ones who talk about innovation the most. In my work with senior leadership teams and boards around the world, I encounter this assumption constantly — and it’s almost always wrong.
The most common failure mode isn’t leaders who chase innovation recklessly. It is leaders who quietly decide innovation isn’t really their concern. Not explicitly — you rarely hear a CEO say they don’t believe in innovation. But implicitly, through the choices they make: the priorities they set, the language they use, the metrics they hold their organisations to. Somewhere between the aspiration and the execution, innovation becomes someone else’s job. The Chief Innovation Officer’s. The R&D function’s. The separate innovation lab’s, operating at a safe distance from the core business.
This happens, in my experience, for a very specific reason: most leaders don’t have a clear enough understanding of what innovation actually is and how it works. They associate it with creativity, disruption and risk — things that feel disconnected from their primary obligation to deliver performance and growth. And so, instead of making innovation central to how they lead, they make it peripheral. They sponsor it. They fund it. They celebrate it when it appears. But they don’t lead for it.
Here is the reframe that changes everything, and it’s the foundation of how I work with leadership teams around the world: innovation is not a thing in itself. It is an outcome. Specifically, it is what happens when you build the right leadership system and the right culture around the pursuit of a clearly defined growth objective. You don’t focus on innovation. You focus on outcomes — and you use the principles and architecture of what innovation requires as the foundation for how you deliver them.
Two recent McKinsey conversations demonstrate exactly what this looks like at scale: David Solomon, Chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Chris Nassetta, President and CEO of Hilton. Neither of them is running an innovation programme. Both of them are producing sustained, compounding innovation-led growth. The reason is the same in both cases, and it is the reason this approach is so powerful.
They never stopped innovating. They stopped making innovation the point.
This is a critical distinction that is easy to misread. When I say these leaders don’t “focus on innovation,” I don’t mean they have deprioritised it. I mean something more precise: they have refused to treat innovation as a thing in itself, and instead use the underlying architecture of innovation — the conditions, capabilities and cultural attributes that make it possible — as the scaffolding for how they run their organisations toward growth.
Think about what innovation actually requires to thrive: clarity of purpose, psychological safety, willingness to experiment, tolerance of failure, cross-functional collaboration, honest assessment of what is working, speed of decision-making, strong people in critical roles, and a culture that continuously questions assumptions. These are not soft aspirations. They are demanding organisational capabilities. And when you build a leadership system and culture that genuinely embodies them, innovation doesn’t need to be mandated — it becomes the natural output.
This is the architecture Solomon and Nassetta have built, in quite different ways. Neither uses the word “innovation” extensively. But look at what they have actually constructed, and it is innovation infrastructure from end to end.
Outcome clarity as the engine of innovation
Solomon inherited Goldman Sachs in 2018 in a firm that had, by his own assessment, stopped investing in growth. Revenues had been flat for a decade. The culture carried the residual habits of a private partnership more focused on its partners than on shareholder value. His diagnosis was precise: “We had a lot of things going on that we were spending time and resources on that really weren’t moving the needle.”
His response was not an innovation programme. It was focus — a deliberate concentration on what Goldman was genuinely world-class at, and an operating ethos called OneGS designed to break down internal silos so the firm could serve clients as a unified whole rather than a collection of competing product businesses. “What are we really good at? What moves the needle?” That clarity of outcome — growth, client centricity, scale — became the organising principle of everything else.
The result: revenues grew from $36 billion in 2019 to $60 billion. Earnings per share more than doubled.
Nassetta tells a structurally similar story. When he arrived at Hilton in 2007, the company had eight brands, mediocre competitive performance, and a culture that had drifted. His response was not to declare an innovation mandate. It was to define two non-negotiable outcomes — be the best place to work in the world, and be the best place to stay — and then to build every element of the organisation in service of those outcomes.
The result: 25 brands (and counting), 240 million Honours members (up from 20 million), margins 1,000 basis points higher post-COVID than their pre-COVID peak, and the best stock performance in Hilton’s public history.
What makes both stories significant for how I think about building innovation capability is this: the moment leaders define outcomes with that degree of precision and hold the whole organisation accountable to them, they create the conditions innovation needs to flourish. You cannot deliver those kinds of results through incremental management. You have to continuously look outward, adapt, experiment, improve and create. Innovation becomes not a programme running alongside the business but a core operating behaviour of the business itself. The outcome demand generates the innovation supply.
Culture as the delivery mechanism
Most organisations that struggle with innovation don’t have a creativity problem. They have a culture problem. Specifically, they have a culture that was built for efficiency and execution — and they are trying to layer innovation onto it as an afterthought.
The leaders who consistently produce innovation-led growth understand that culture is not the soft stuff that sits around the edges of strategy. It is the operating system that determines what the organisation is actually capable of delivering. Build the right culture, and innovation is what comes out. Build the wrong one, and no amount of innovation programming will compensate.
Nassetta is explicitly clear on this. “What I would have reinforced to myself 18 years ago is that the two most important things a leader does are build a great culture and build a great strategy.” He credits Hilton’s culture — its number one ranking as a best place to work globally — as the reason the company emerged from COVID structurally stronger than it entered. “Make sure as a company you have an extraordinary culture, because that’s how you fill the tank up to be able to take the blows that will inevitably come your way.”
Fill the tank. That phrase does a lot of work. Culture built for innovation-led growth is the reserve capacity the organisation draws on when conditions demand adaptation, reinvention and creation at pace. It cannot be installed in a crisis. It has to exist before one arrives — which means the time to build it is always now, regardless of whether the pressure to innovate feels acute.
What Nassetta has built at Hilton — agility and adaptability wired into the culture by design, psychological safety strong enough to be recognised by half a million employees as a genuine best place to work, and an explicit expectation of continuous reinvention from the top down — is precisely the culture architecture that makes innovation a default behaviour rather than an exceptional one.
Solomon makes the same point through a different lens. His mechanism for cultural change at Goldman was twofold: firstly, deep, patient investment in getting leadership buy-in. (“I’m a big believer that it starts at the very top of the firm and getting the broader leadership group to really embrace it”), and secondly, ruthless alignment of incentives with the behaviours the firm needed. “If you want certain behaviour, incentivise certain behaviour.”
This is where most innovation agendas break down in practice. Leaders declare a culture of innovation but leave the incentive and accountability structures unchanged. They announce the aspiration and expect the organisation to self-select into new behaviours. What both Solomon and Nassetta understand is that the architecture has to change — not the language. When the reward system and the performance framework are aligned with the outcomes you need, the culture shifts to produce them. Innovation follows.
Technology as accelerant, not ambition
Both leaders are navigating the AI transition, and both are doing so in ways that further illustrate the outcome-first model. Neither is treating AI as a signal of modernity or an innovation aspiration to be displayed. Both are asking the prior question: what outcomes are we trying to achieve, and how does AI help us get there faster?
For Solomon, the answer runs through operational efficiency. Goldman has identified six core processes to re-engineer using AI, with the explicit goal of generating savings that can be reinvested in growth. “The more exciting but harder part is figuring out how we use AI to remake processes that give us enormous operating efficiency and therefore free up dollars and resources to be invested in other places where we think we can grow.” AI, in other words, is in service of the growth outcome — not an end in itself.
For Nassetta, AI is the means to something Hilton has always aspired to but never been able to fully deliver at scale: mass customisation. He describes being able to atomise every element of the guest experience — every room, every amenity, every touch point — and serve it to each individual customer in exactly the form they want. “AI is the greatest gift I’ve ever seen to enable us to deliver alpha in fulfillment.” Fulfilment is the outcome. AI is the enabler.
What both leaders share is outcome-first thinking applied to technology. They have not asked “what can AI do?” and built backwards. They have asked “what do our customers need and what does our strategy require?” and then identified how AI accelerates it. This is precisely the discipline I work to instill in leadership teams: tools and technologies are only as powerful as the clarity of the outcomes you are deploying them toward.
Reinvention as the personal commitment at the top
The architecture of innovation — clear outcomes, the right culture, aligned incentives, outcome-first use of technology — still fails if the leaders at the top are not personally committed to continuous reinvention. This is the dimension that is hardest to build into an organisation from the outside, and the one that both Solomon and Nassetta address most directly.
Nassetta is unusually candid: “The minute I can’t reinvent myself or I’m unwilling to reinvent my team, I should retire.” He frames intellectual curiosity, competitive drive and the recognition that “what got you to where you are doesn’t mean doing the same thing is going to end up in the same place” as CEO-level non-negotiables — not attributes to be developed in the organisation while the leader remains unchanged. The architecture of innovation starts at the top, or it doesn’t really start at all.
Solomon is equally direct, specifically about people: “If you feel you might have a problem with someone in an important leadership job, and it’s not working or they’re not the right fit, it’s probably not going to get better. Making decisions on people when you feel it’s not working is the most important thing.” The outcome you are pursuing is only as achievable as the team pursuing it. Leading for innovation-led growth means holding the bar on people with the same rigour as the bar on strategy.
Both of these commitments — to personal reinvention and to relentless people quality — are expressions of the same underlying truth: the organisations that sustain innovation-led growth are ones where the leadership is continuously closing the gap between the organisation they have and the organisation the next phase of growth requires. That is not something you can delegate to an innovation function. It is a leadership responsibility, and it has to be owned at the top.
Why this approach works
This is the model I have built my work around, and these two case studies reinforce exactly why it is so powerful. Building leadership and culture for innovation-led growth is not about getting leaders to love innovation more. It is about helping them understand what innovation actually requires — and then building those requirements into the foundation of how they lead and how their cultures operate.
When that happens, innovation stops being a programme and becomes a capability. It stops being a function and becomes a behaviour. It stops being the objective and becomes the outcome — the natural result of an organisation that has the leadership clarity, cultural architecture and people quality to continuously create, adapt and grow.
Solomon and Nassetta did not succeed by talking about innovation. They succeeded by building the conditions innovation needs, at every level of their organisations, in service of outcomes they refused to be vague about. The innovation came because the system produced it. That is the point. That is always the point.
The organisations that will lead their industries over the next decade are not the ones with the most innovation budget or the most elaborate innovation infrastructure. They are the ones with leaders who understand that innovation is what happens when you build the right leadership system and the right culture — and who have the discipline and courage to build both, relentlessly, over time.
If this resonates with how you’re thinking about growth — or with the gap between the innovation your organisation talks about and the growth it’s actually producing — Cris works directly with a small number of CEOs and leadership teams each year. You can reach him at cris@crisbeswick.com.