Many who have wrestled with the topic of innovation over the last few decades will readily agree that innovation as a mandate or buzz word often has good intentions that do not lead anywhere. The surprising tension that carries through many innovation false starts is not the desire, talent, or creativity. It is the leadership needed to truly embed innovation processes and actions into the DNA of a company that is usually missing.
The question I always ask is why this is and what we can do to break through?
The “why’s” are many and are universal to any business. The largest inhibitor to innovative change operationally is the manager and employee mindset and the employee framework. If you have read any standard job description coupled with a company org chart and career ladders, most have no way to institutionalize innovation in a way that is quantifiable and interrelated to other disciplines. Nor can it be taught by managers who merely delegate.
To add insult to injury, the folks that write job descriptions often have no actual deep knowledge or tangible ability for the job descriptions they are writing. Like AI, when innovation as an idea becomes a CEO level mandate, there are few that can translate these company level goals into actual actions and results that stick. Enter the Rebel Leader.
My framing of the idea of rebel is less Johnny Rotten and more Marcus Aurelius. The most successful rebel leaders I have met that deliver on innovation and AI mandates do so not by pushing away from but by leaning into business behaviors and mechanisms. Effective rebel leaders are tacticians that master the overlap of politics, adoption, and execution. When these three factors work together, the best kind of innovation becomes locked into the success of a business.
Let’s unpack a real use case. We’ve recently worked with a global organization in retail that generates revenue in the low Billions. At a high level they are doing very well and are a brand that customers love and believe in. At a deeper level they are large, complex, and prone to doubling down on existing processes and methods that have proven successful. Given their revenue targets it makes sense to keep doing what is working.
Like any organization, an upward growth trajectory is not guaranteed so finding new ways to drive revenue is where innovation can play a huge part. Our rebel leader, lets call her Jaime, has been at the organization for about 5 years and is a VP that has the respect of the C-Suite and a small talented team that supports her. What makes Jaime a rebel leader is her restless curiosity and her ability to see across teams and roles to get things done.
What she has learned in the last 5 years that has made her successful is her ability to understand the needs of leadership and to find unconventional ways to bring genuine insight to the table. For example, how AI is impacting retail is a huge area that can unlock revenue. No one at the CMO or CEO level has the deep knowledge to move from the idea of AI unlocking a new revenue stream and actually demonstrating it. Jaime does.
With a realistic below the line budget, she assembled a small team that did internal and external research to determine the best adjustments to current methods to generate more revenue based on the needs of their most valued customer profiles. A central solution was testing changes to messaging along with a better understanding of how social content was leveraged to make customer purchase choices. Based on five hypotheses, Jaime and her small team did in-store testing and drafted real data on how simple yet key changes hiding in plain sight could generate an uptick in sales. When extrapolated to all stores the tweaks could result in real revenue growth.
Jaime’s true talent was how she brought this information to leadership. Short, sweet, and to the point. First, all of the hypothesis, testing, and work was couched in the idea that these findings are the result of leaderships’ innovation mandates and directives. Jaimie is merely the messenger of the data and findings. Whether to implement the tested ideas was left to leadership but it was made clear how her team could give other teams the clarity they needed to really deliver and through a few achieveable changes to process and approach, new revenue was all but guaranteed.
As rebel leader, Jaime knows that others have to be able to take credit for the success if new methods are to gain adoption. You have to allow other leaders to co-own the success. In addition, Jaime knows that her team has to work hard to push the idea up hill so that when presented to leadership, the work to make it actually happen is far easier to say yes to than to say no.
Jaime’s approach to innovation is practical and is tied to business success, not some abstract idea. In this way, other leaders do not feel threatened and don't see the work as a fundamental change that requires slow lumbering consensus building or a massive line item in the budget.
This kind of incremental innovation is ideal for large organizations that are often siloed and find it hard to do new things. The undercurrent is a deliberate embracing of diplomacy and letting data tell the story while making changes as low risk as possible and as quickly proven as possible. Once this approach has a successful use case in the wild, Jaime can build on this success and develop new hypotheses and run the same program.
Jaime is a rebel because she is bucking the system by working within it to successfully navigate wbetween the danger zones of personality, financial requirement, and risk. The is a delicate dance that requires someone who can see beyond their role and also see deeper to connect the real specialized skills adn talent needed to build and sustain new behaviors.
Most leadership often feel they can float above the clouds or work on the business and not in the business. In this day and age where AI orchestration and speed to market are the divers for growth, platitudes and generalized administrative directives are an intert promise. It is the rebel leader that can have one foot in the boardroom and one foot in the nuanced details in the trenches, and can effectively orchestrate both, that truly wins. If you can demonstrate that a new program, process, or product can quantifiably connect to increased revenue then the answer will be yes and yes instead of no or maybe.
But rebel leaders are not always heard. In the early 90’s Walmart employee Robert Davis was running successful e-commerce experiments. Even with the right data and team Walmart passed on Robert’s ambition to scale ecommerce resulting in decades of effort and lost revenue chasing Amazon.
Rebel leaders occupy unique and often the hardest positions in large organizations sitting in between the C-Suite, management, and makers. This place allows rebel leaders to see far out and close up at the same time while also requiring buy-in from leadership and deep respect from peers. The key piece to this role is having the ambition and optimism to take pride in being accountable for outcomes that you don't fully control. This drive must be backed up by tangible metrics and execution and when things go well, credit must be given to leadership while making it all look inevitable and easy. Strategy, diplomacy, data, orchestration, execution, and scale all have to all come together while giving every stakeholder the right information and confidence to build consensus and to say yes.
A classic case of rebel leadership in action is Satya Nadella’s tenure at Microsoft before he became CEO. He led Cloud and Enterprise and grew Azure from within. The key was working to frame everything as a logical extension of Microsoft’s existing leadership vision and ensure success was co-owned. His unique combination of below the radar influence while actively working the tactics of politics, adoption, incremental change, and execution without losing sight of business outcomes was the key to his success. Harvard Business Review's recent article Why Great innovations Fail to Scale speaks in-depth about how breakthrough solutions requires leaders who excel at collaborating across boundaries.
Practical innovation is real. NVIDIA's third annual State of AI in Retail and CPG report (2026) puts the opportunity in clear terms with 91% of respondents either actively using or assessing AI, the competitive question in retail and CPG has shifted from whether to invest in AI to how to most effectively deploy and scale it. 89% of those companies report that AI has already helped increase revenue. Among those seeing results, 30% report revenue increases of more than 10%, while more than half cite meaningful gains in employee productivity and operational efficiency. And yet the gap between that upside and actual investment remains wide. In our view, the barrier isn't budget or desire, it's the absence of someone who can move from concept to in-store test to boardroom brief without losing the thread. That is the rebel leader's lane.
At PreSeason we champion the rebel leadership within each of us by working to develop the right business hypothesis to unlock value and to build the data and proof to make practical innovation real. If you have an AI or Innovation mandate and need a clear path from idea to execution this is exactly the kind of problem we are built to solve.
Let’s work together.
