Adam Hartung

Vistage Speaker | Founder – Spark Partners | TEC Canada Speaker

Adam Hartung, founder of Spark Partners, is a leading expert on strategy and disruptive innovation. He co-founded a company that built the first general-purpose computing platform and later held key roles at The Boston Consulting Group, PepsiCo, DuPont, and AM International. Adam’s book, *Create Marketplace Disruption*, was named a top 25 business book, and he’s authored over 400 columns for Forbes. He now helps organizations drive growth through strategy, innovation, and adapting to disruption.

Adam Hartung

Vistage Speaker | Founder – Spark Partners | TEC Canada Speaker

Adam Hartung, founder of Spark Partners, is a leading expert on strategy and disruptive innovation. He co-founded a company that built the first general-purpose computing platform and later held key roles at The Boston Consulting Group, PepsiCo, DuPont, and AM International. Adam’s book, *Create Marketplace Disruption*, was named a top 25 business book, and he’s authored over 400 columns for Forbes. He now helps organizations drive growth through strategy, innovation, and adapting to disruption.

Adam’s Topics

In today’s fast-paced world, there is no universal strategy for long-term success; organizations must be adaptive to thrive. Traditional strategic planning focused on identifying an “unassailable” strength, like technology or low costs, but this approach has proven flawed, as every market leader has a weakness competitors can exploit. This session uses superheroes as metaphors to show how even dominant companies like Sears, Blockbuster, and Kodak faltered when they couldn’t adapt. Instead of a monolithic strategy, businesses need a “transformer” approach, quickly pivoting to meet customer needs and evolving competition. Attendees will learn how focusing on trends and fringe competition, along with making critical resource decisions, leads to better, sustainable outcomes.

As a leader with a clear vision for growth, it’s essential to have an engaged and inspired team to achieve your goals. Whether you’re sustaining, transforming, or disrupting your industry, you need more than followers; you need devoted team members who are driven by a shared purpose. This comes from creating a “Think/Feel/Do” culture, where the cognitive and behavioral drivers of performance are supported by a deep, passionate connection to the organization’s mission. A strong culture inspires change because people are motivated to act, not just told to do so. When leaders influence and inspire, rather than control, teams will rise to achieve extraordinary outcomes, even in challenging times.

Innovation is crucial for survival, but many organizations focus only on improving existing products, making them vulnerable to disruptive innovators. This session, based on over 10,000 case studies and 20 years of experience with Clayton Christensen, explains why companies like Sears and Kodak failed, and how to shift management practices to foster disruptive innovation. It also provides tools for adapting to market trends and succeeding in a post-COVID world, preparing businesses for future disruptions.

Many businesses struggle to align resources, including people and investments, with a mission that delivers their vision, leading to confusion among employees, customers, and stakeholders. As organizations grow, their value proposition often becomes muddled, shifting focus from meeting evolving customer needs to optimizing internal processes. This session explores how to define a clear business purpose around unmet customer needs, ensuring that the vision and mission are aligned, ultimately leading to more successful growth and stronger customer relationships.

Effective communication is about connecting, educating, convincing, and motivating others with a clear purpose. Success in communication hinges on credibility, which builds reputation and strengthens a brand. Think of credibility as a currency that must be managed carefully—more deposits than withdrawals ensure your reputation remains resilient. The Reputation Bank assessment helps identify where credibility is being built or eroded across communication channels, guiding organizations to make meaningful, consistent deposits into their reputation. By doing so, companies can sustain long-term brand wealth and weather any potential negative issues.

The Symbiotic Leader draws inspiration from nature’s successful organizational design, using the concept of symbiosis to teach leaders how to manage diverse workplace ecosystems. Just as natural ecosystems thrive on biodiversity, workplace ecosystems flourish when individuals and groups with unique capabilities work together harmoniously toward collective goals. Symbiotic leadership fosters cooperation, balances strengths and weaknesses, and ensures that diverse perspectives contribute to organizational growth, adaptability, and resilience. This session shows how symbiotic leaders empower teams to thrive by recognizing the value in every contributor and fostering a culture of interdependence and mutual success.

This presentation, focused on Business Strategy and Innovation Management, challenges the outdated business lifecycle model and emphasizes that companies must maintain a growth focus to thrive. Using examples of both failures (Xerox, Kodak, Sears, etc.) and successes (Apple, Amazon, Tesla), it demonstrates how adopting growth strategies is essential for avoiding decline. Attendees will learn best practices for trend and competitor analysis, strategic pivots, and innovation management, with practical tools for strategic planning and adaptive goal-setting. Based on 20 years of research, this session equips leaders with the knowledge to navigate disruptions like COVID-19 and develop strategies for long-term success in an ever-changing business landscape.

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