The Reinventor's Mindset: Books, bourbon and the magic of friction

Last week I stood in front of a room full of entrepreneurship academics and said something I wasn't sure they wanted to hear.

"The most underserved application of entrepreneurship education is inside large systems. Not outside them."

I was on a panel for the Australasian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research Excellence (ACERE) at the University of Sydney. The Treasury Intergenerational Report tells us that 107% of Australia's per capita GDP growth over the next 40 years will come from productivity. In the long run, innovation is almost everything.

But most innovation happens - or fails to happen - inside large organisations. Inside constrained environments where you can't move fast, can't break things, and can't ignore the people who've been there longer than you.

That's where mindset matters most. And it's where we teach it least.

The question that silenced the room

One question from the audience made the room go quiet:

"How do we teach identity, resilience, and purpose?"

An answer soon emerged - experiential friction.

In a world obsessed with removing barriers - frictionless onboarding, frictionless learning, frictionless everything - a room full of educators began debating how to make things deliberately harder.

One academic described reintroducing viva voce examinations - oral defence of your ideas, in real time, with nowhere to hide. The Socratic method, dusted off and put back to work.

It struck me that we need to do the same to leadership development - replace the comfort of being informed with the discomfort of being challenged, of responding in real time.

Three people responded to my first newsletter on The Reinventor's Mindset - telling me the frameworks articulated something they'd been trying to name. My job now is to turn this into a pedagogy. To make mindset measurable and teachable.

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The Reinventor's Mindset: Pay The Price

With Rob Samuels (Managing Director, Maker's Mark Distillery)

I met Rob at INSEAD. Somewhere between a leadership simulation and a very good bourbon, he taught me how to make a Keeneland Breeze - Maker's Mark, ginger ale, curaçao, and a big slice of orange.

His family's whiskey. His family's recipe.

They've been making whiskey for eight generations. Over 200 years. But would you believe it, Rob's grandparents walked away from 160 years of, in his words, "mediocre whiskey." They started again with Maker's Mark. And promptly didn't turn a profit for 25 years.

I asked him about innovation. I expected he'd talk about heritage - protecting the legacy, honouring tradition. Instead, I found a family of multi-generational innovators.

"It's easy to innovate in a lazy way. But how do you innovate in a way that's groundbreaking, pioneering, and worthy of what came before?"

From his grandma Margie, who pioneered experiential tourism, to his dog Star, a Lagotto Romagnolo who discovered a truffle new to this world, "The Kentucky Winter White," Rob's family has never stopped innovating.

Nature is the maker

"Nature is the maker," Rob told me.

Not a slogan - a philosophy. Regenerating the soil delivers the flavour. Stewardship of nature isn't separate from the product. It IS the product. That's why his family protects it.

Maker's Mark is now the only B Corp distillery in North America. They've gone global without scaling up. They still hand-dip 29 million bottles a year.

The infinite mindset

He talked about Suntory - the Japanese company that acquired Maker's Mark - and how they share the same "infinite mindset." Long-term thinking. No shortcuts. Purpose over quarterly returns.

I knew exactly what he meant.

I once worked at a subsidiary of Dai-ichi Life, a Japanese insurance company. I came from an ASX-listed investment bank - quarterly earnings, short cycles, maximise the number.

In my first year, Dai-ichi asked for a 10-year business plan. I thought they were joking. They weren't. They thought in decades and had a vision for the next century.

At my first visit to head office, they told me a story:

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dai-ichi made a decision: they would pay insurance claims to anyone who could produce a piece of Dai-ichi merchandise - even without the original policy. Back then, salespeople would knock on doors, sell a policy, and leave behind a small gift. That gift became proof of a promise.

They weren't thinking about the quarter. They were thinking about what kind of company they wanted to be in 100 years.

Protecting what matters

Rob gets it. His family gets it.

"How do you manage growth and retain your authenticity?" Rob asked. "That is very, very hard to do."

It is. But that's the Pay the Price framework. You protect what matters. You let others put their fingerprints on the rest. And you keep your north star in view - not behind you, but ahead. For 100 years.

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Watch the full conversation

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