In a world where competitive advantages erode faster than ever, the pursuit of leadership is no longer about scale or dominance but about sustained distinctiveness. At a recent session of the India CEO Forum in Mumbai, Shishir Joshipura, former MD of Praj Industries, set out a compelling case for treating innovation not as a toolkit but as a cultural anchor. He argued that true growthemerges when organisations stop chasing quarterly wins and instead build systems that outlast individuals. Innovation, in his telling, is the lever that enables businesses not merely to play the game better, but to rewrite the rules altogether. The attached podcast summarises these discussions, but briefly: The true race for organisations is to be unique, not number one; sustained advantage comes from creating distinctiveness that is hard to replicate.Leaders must build for perpetuity and optionality, looking beyond quarterly results to ensure resilience and long-term relevance.Innovation is a mindset and culture, not a tool; embedding it as a core value is essential to drive systemic change.Active listening to customers, cross-disciplinary collaboration and employee pride form the bedrock of an innovation ecosystem.Innovation can be incremental, disruptive or breakthrough in nature. Leaders must personally champion the latter two while creating systems that tolerate and learn from failure.For MNCs, the guiding principle is to be local as much as necessary, global as much aspossible; speed and action bias often matter more than consensus.

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