Leader’s Digest | April 2025

Welcome to the April 2025 edition of the Leader’s Digest, your monthly guide to business leadership. This time, we’ll dig deeper into the topic of innovation.

Contents

• How to Break 6 Common Barriers to Innovation
• Tips for Improving Continuously
• Adapting Strategy in a Shifting Global Landscape
• Speaker of the month: Milda Mitkutė
• Warm Welcome NBF 2025 Partners
• Inspirational Quote by Guy Kawasaki

New Leadership Insights

How to Break 6 Common Barriers to Innovation

What’s really holding companies back from innovation? During our recent interview, Diana Kander, serial entrepreneur, innovation strategist, and speaker at Nordic Business Forum 2025, pointed out the usual blockers and how to overcome them. Here are a few key insights from our conversation:

1️⃣ Innovation starts (and stalls) with the customer
“If you’re not getting surprising feedback from customers, you’re probably not asking the right questions—or any at all.”

2️⃣ Leadership sets the tone for innovation
“The number one mistake companies make is thinking innovation is everybody else’s job other than the leader’s.”

3️⃣ Blind spots are your biggest blockers
“We have this to-do list of things we think need to happen. But there’s another list—our blind spots—that we’re not even aware of. And that’s where the real obstacles to innovation often lie.”

4️⃣ Make time to think, or creativity won’t happen
“If curiosity and reflection aren’t on your calendar, they don’t exist.”

5️⃣ Big change needs the right conditions
“Think about planning a hike. You’d bring the right shoes, water, maybe a few friends. But if suddenly that hike turns into climbing a mountain? That same gear and group won’t cut it. You’d need a totally different preparation.”

6️⃣ Replace static plans with smart experiments
“This isn’t planning—it’s pre-planning. You’re figuring out what works before you scale. That’s what agility really means.”

Read the Full Blog

Tips for Improving Continuously

In times of change, innovative leaders rely on adaptability, steady progress, and continuous learning. Here are a few insights to guide your growth:

Growth starts with rethinking: Adam Grant says learning begins when we admit we’re wrong. The faster we rethink, the faster we improve.

Set the pace with a “20-Mile March”: Morten Hansen encourages setting clear, consistent goals. Steady progress beats reactive pivots in uncertain times.

Make feedback routine, not reactive: Kim Scott urges leaders to embed regular feedback into daily work. It builds alignment, momentum, and trust.

Dream big—and say it out loud: Will Guidara believes bold goals create energy and innovation. Speaking them aloud increases the chance of making them real.

Watch the full video for more ideas on continuous improvement from the NBF 2024 speakers.

Adapting Strategy in a Shifting Global Landscape

Innovation and continuous improvement are crucial—but they don’t happen in a vacuum. In today’s rapidly changing geopolitical environment, global trade dynamics like the recent U.S. tariff hikes are reshaping the playing field for many European businesses.

A recent Harvard Business Review article highlights how leaders can respond—not with fixed plans, but with adaptive thinking. Here are three key mindsets to help navigate the uncertainty:

🔄 Build capabilities, not rigid plans: Long-term masterplans won’t hold in a fast-changing environment. Focus on building internal tools and processes to track, assess, and respond as things evolve.

💡 Recheck your assumptions often: The current trade dynamics could shift (and seem to be shifting) quickly, so follow the situation often and stay in the know.

⚖️ Balance short- and long-term thinking: Don’t get stuck only reacting to today’s headlines. Strategic decisions need to account for both near-term volatility and long-term structural impact.

We recommend to read the full article to also learn about the global implications of the US tariffs.

NBF Spotlight

Speaker of the Month: Milda Mitkutė

Milda Mitkutė is the co-founder of Vinted, an online platform for buying, selling, and exchanging secondhand clothes.

The idea originated in 2008 when Milda, preparing to move from her hometown in Lithuania to Vilnius, wanted to find a new home for her excess clothes. She partnered with Justas Janauskas to create Vinted and only a year later Vinted expanded to Germany. Currently, the company is operating in over 20 markets with more than 2,000 employees.

Since her career building and growing Vinted, Milda has invested in other ventures and is now working on her new business in the education sector.

At Nordic Business Forum 2025, Milda will engage in a Main Stage discussion to share how she created and grew Vinted to become a successful unicorn.

Warm Welcome NBF 2025 Partners

As Nordic Business Forum 2025 is getting closer, we’re thrilled to welcome a great lineup of partners onboard! From side events to private working spaces, our partners will be there to make your event experience even greater. And this is just the beginning—stay tuned as we announce more partners soon! ✨

Stop and Think

“Great disruption occurs when people in a company want to make meaning as opposed to simply making money.”

Guy Kawasaki