The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving14 Touko 2025

551: Microsoft Director on How to Empower Anyone to Innovate

What if the key to driving real innovation isn't genius, but orchestration?

Innovation is often seen as the domain of visionaries or tech geniuses. But in this episode, JoAnn Garbin, former Director of Innovation at Microsoft Cloud and co-author of The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, shows that true innovation is a craft: one grounded in discipline, collaboration, and conscious leadership.

JoAnn brings a rare lens to the conversation — an engineer with a background in philosophy and performance, a systems thinker who has lived through startup exits, corporate reinvention, and a life-altering cancer diagnosis. Her approach to leadership, creativity, and risk is grounded not in theory but in lived experience.

We talk about:

How real innovation happens inside complex, slow-moving organizations
Why orchestration, not brilliance, is the most underrated leadership skill
The critical role of community and trust in long-term innovation success
How to build political capital without becoming "political"
What cancer taught her about control, clarity, and letting go
The mindset shift that makes innovation more accessible (and less magical)

JoAnn also shares how she navigates uncertainty with structured frameworks, how she invests in her learning every day, and why innovation, especially in an AI-powered future, must be inclusive, sustainable, and human-centered.

Whether you're leading change, launching something new, or trying to stay relevant in a fast-shifting world, this episode will expand how you think about creativity, courage, and what it really means to build something that lasts.

JoAnn Garbin is a former Director of Innovation in Microsoft's cloud business. She is the founder of Regenerous Labs, where she focuses on building practical solutions across industries that integrate sustainability and innovation.

Get JoAnn's book here: https://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com/

The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

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686: How VC Shapes Startups with Benjamin Shestakofsky (Strategy Skills classics)

For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic featuring an interview with the author of Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, Benjamin Shestakofs...

28 Syys 50min

685: Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Strategy Skills classics)

For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic featuring an interview with the authors of Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit....

16 Syys 52min

684: Founder and CEO of Triggers, Leslie Zane. The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion (Strategy Skills classics)

For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic interview with an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growt...

9 Syys 48min

683: Professor of Finance at Copenhagen Business School, Jesper Rangvid, on the End of 40 Years of Falling Interest Rates

Jesper Rangvid, professor of finance at Copenhagen Business School, explores what leaders should understand about interest rates, inflation, the cost of capital, prioritization, and AI. Rangvid explai...

7 Syys 50min

682: Founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, Elliott Parker. The Illusion of Innovation (Strategy Skills classics)

For this episode, let's revisit a strategy skills classic interview with the author of The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, Elliott Parker. The Illusion of Inn...

2 Syys 48min

681: Harvard's Cornelia Choe on How Great Leaders See Differently

Cornelia Choe explains why being right is no longer enough for leaders operating in environments of constant change. She calls the problem "perspective blindness": we may be correct about what we see ...

31 Elo 40min

680: Psychotherapist, Glenn Hutchinson, on Why Good People Cheat: What Infidelity Reveals About Decision-Making

Glenn Hutchinson, a psychotherapist who developed the personality science behind the assessments used by Match.com, explores one of the most misunderstood aspects of infidelity: why people sometimes v...

26 Elo 45min

679: Director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center at MIT, Amos Winter on Global by Design

Amos Winter, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center at MIT, explains how innovators can create high-performance, affordable product...

24 Elo 58min