New to Big

Why do some companies continue to grow with startup-like energy while others stall out into slow decline? In New to Big, David Kidder and Christina Wallace argue that even the largest organizations can reignite entrepreneurial growth—if they install a new operating system for discovery. The authors contend that growth doesn't depend on more money or ideas but on leadership that preserves a startup's hunger, adaptability, and customer obsession inside the machinery of an enterprise.

Their core claim is simple but revolutionary: established companies are excellent at taking what’s big and making it bigger, but terrible at taking what’s new and making it big. To solve this, every enterprise must build a parallel system—a “New to Big” machine—to coexist alongside the “Big to Bigger” engine that runs its existing business. By combining entrepreneurial discovery with the disciplined capital management of venture investing, leaders can continually uncover, validate, and scale new sources of growth.

From Startup Lessons to Corporate Renewal

Kidder draws heavily on experiences from his own startups and from his firm Bionic’s work with companies like GE, Nike, Citigroup, Microsoft, and P&G. He explains how entrepreneurs think and decide in uncertain terrain—what he calls the ‘Five Lenses of Growth.’ While MBAs are trained to optimize known systems, founders are trained to discover unknown opportunities. New to Big teaches enterprises how to integrate those startup mindsets and mechanics into their corporate DNA.

Through this lens, growth becomes a discoverable process rather than a plan. Instead of forecasting based on known markets, companies place a portfolio of small bets on unmet customer needs, testing and learning until new businesses emerge. Large firms can’t predict the future; they can only uncover it through experimentation.

Leadership, Culture, and the 'Day One' Mindset

The book insists that growth starts with the CEO’s mindset. Jeff Bezos’s idea of “Day One” versus “Day Two” frames this argument perfectly. Day One is hungry, fast, and adaptable; Day Two is complacent and bureaucratic. Big companies drift toward Day Two because their leaders reward efficiency over discovery. New to Big shows how to reverse that drift by embracing what Kidder calls 'refounder leadership'—leaders who preserve startup energy inside scaled enterprises. (Satya Nadella’s refounding of Microsoft serves as one of the book’s best examples.)

This transformation demands permission, ownership, and courage. CEOs must personally drive growth and empower teams to test ideas quickly, kill projects that fail, and celebrate learning rather than punish mistakes. Enterprises don’t have an idea problem—they have a leadership problem, the authors claim, because most executives are incentivized to avoid risk instead of create new business value.

Why This Book Matters Now

In a world of accelerating change, traditional business metrics like ROI and IRR can’t guide decisions for unknown markets. Startups have dominated the first wave of disruption by discovering and scaling new industries such as ride-sharing, cloud computing, and fintech, while big corporations largely outsourced innovation to Silicon Valley. Kidder and Wallace argue it’s time for enterprises to fight back. Their advantage lies in scale—customer trust, global distribution, manufacturing, and brand power—that startups lack. If those assets are paired with startup speed and entrepreneurial discovery, big can beat fast.

Throughout the book, readers will learn why traditional planning must give way to discovery, how to identify large unmet customer needs, validate ideas quickly, invest like venture capitalists, build ambidextrous leadership, and install a permanent growth operating system. It’s both a manual and a manifesto for corporate reinvention, arguing that your legacy organization doesn’t have to envy startups—it can become one.

“Big used to beat little; today, fast beats big. But if you can become both fast and big—if you learn to go from New to Big—you win.”

That is the promise of New to Big: transforming not just how organizations innovate, but how they lead. It’s a call for every executive, entrepreneur, and intrapreneur to play offense, rediscover their curiosity, and make growth a permanent capability.

Kidder and Wallace trace the paradox of modern capitalism: how twentieth-century corporations optimized themselves into stagnation. Through a historical lens, they explain that efficiency became a dangerous fetish. The world moved from founder-led capitalism—where companies served communities and customers—to managerial capitalism focused on ratios, quarterly returns, and shareholder value. This shift suffocated innovation inside big enterprises.

The Rise of Efficiency Thinking

In the mid-twentieth century, American companies were guided by managers trained to maximize return on assets and minimize waste. Business schools taught leaders that success was about eliminating variation and risk. Tools like RONA and IRR transformed managers into guardians of stability. When the 1980s introduced Six Sigma and the cult of shareholder value, efficiency became the universal religion. Leaders learned to cut costs and buy back stock rather than explore new markets.

Shareholders Take Over the Story

Economists like Michael Jensen and William Meckling argued that executives existed to serve shareholders, not communities or customers. This new logic shaped decades of corporate behavior. CEOs got rich by manipulating ratios rather than expanding value. Every quarter became a test of financial cosmetics. Innovation turned into “spending risk capital,” and anything not immediately profitable was killed. As Kidder points out, this era created the illusion of growth—numbers looked good while creativity died.

The Efficiency Trap

When the dot-com boom arrived, tech entrepreneurs disrupted every sector by doing the opposite of managerial orthodoxy. Startups took big risks on unknown markets and rapid learning cycles. Corporate giants watched from the sidelines, unable to respond because all their systems were designed for predictability, not discovery. The result was what Clayton Christensen called “the innovator’s dilemma.”

By 2018, the most valuable companies—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft—were led by founders who prioritized customer obsession and new growth. These leaders built organizations that never stopped experimenting. The message was clear: efficiency is no longer enough. Long-term growth now depends on rediscovering curiosity and purpose.

“Companies optimized for predictability are at war with creativity. Their capabilities become their disabilities when disruption is afoot.”

The authors argue that the next era of leadership must balance purpose with experimentation. Instead of defending the status quo, CEOs must become refounders—leaders who rebuild their organizations for discovery. Social purpose, customer value, and sustainable growth replace quarterly performance as the new scorecard. The survival of modern enterprises depends on relearning how to build the new.

Traditional business strategy starts with a Total Addressable Market (TAM). Entrepreneurs, however, start with a Total Addressable Problem (TAP). Kidder and Wallace urge leaders to stop asking “How much market share can we get?” and begin asking “Which big human problems are we uniquely able to solve?”

Thinking from the Outside In

Big companies usually think from the inside out—using their existing technology and distribution channels to hunt for customers. Startups invert that lens. They look for unmet needs in the world and design solutions backward from the customer problem. This shift from TAM to TAP reframes growth: it’s not about taking share, it’s about creating new markets. Facebook’s founders, for instance, saw not a niche market of students but a global human need for connection. That difference is why their TAM seemed small but their TAP was massive.

Discovering Opportunity Areas

The authors introduce the concept of Opportunity Areas (OAs)—intersections between emerging technologies and new customer behaviors. By studying these intersections, teams identify “good hunting grounds” for growth. TD Ameritrade’s experiment offers an example: executives initially loved a digital tool idea, but ethnographic research revealed no real customer need. The OA team invalidated the idea quickly, saving millions and refocusing on needs that actually mattered. Failure became learning, not shame.

Sizing and Timing Growth

TAP thinking reframes scale. You estimate not how much of today’s market exists, but how big the unmet problem could be if solved radically better. Uber’s “problem size” wasn’t taxis—it was global personal mobility. When startups shift the question from TAM to TAP, they uncover exponential potential. This mind-set forces leaders to look at problems, not projects. It reveals new frontiers rather than incremental opportunities.

Kidder concludes that TAM planning keeps you safe; TAP discovery makes you significant. By embedding discovery teams, customer observation, and ethnography into the enterprise, companies can uncover billions in latent demand hiding beneath unaddressed human problems.

Growth leadership is radically different from operational leadership. Kidder identifies ten mindsets that define growth leaders—executives who can both operate and create. These mindsets transform managers into founders inside their own organizations.

Ten Shifts from Operator to Creator

• Turn Outside In: Stop relying on internal expertise and study external forces—customer behaviors, trends, and technologies shaping the world.
• Focus on Do vs. Say: Measure actions, not opinions. Design experiments where customers prove their intent through behavior.
• Embrace Productive Failure: Kill zombie projects and celebrate learnings. Failure is success in disguise when it reveals commercial truth.
• Expire Your Data: Treat old knowledge like spoiled milk. Question assumptions regularly.
• End Your Addiction to Being Right: Replace certainty with curiosity; leadership requires asking more questions.
• Lead Bullets Only: Ditch magical thinking—growth comes from persistence and multiple small efforts, not silver bullets.
• Don’t Love Things to Death: Protect early ideas with discipline, not indulgence. Overfunding too soon kills creativity.
• Build Ladders to the Moon: Break moonshot ambitions into incremental steps of progress; think like SpaceX, not a catapult.
• No Success Theater: Report reality over optics. Vanity metrics waste energy that could serve customers.
• Be Ambidextrous: Operate and create simultaneously—run the business of today while building tomorrow’s.

Each principle echoes lessons from thinkers like Eric Ries (Lean Startup), Adam Grant (Originals), and Clayton Christensen (Innovator’s Dilemma). Together, they form a playbook for transforming an efficiency-driven corporation into an adaptive learning organism.

“Leadership today must be multidimensional—strong operator, strong creator. You must become ambidextrous.”

Kidder’s final warning: if efficiency leaders don’t evolve into growth leaders, their companies will face “Day Three”—a long, slow decline. The cure isn’t more data or process; it’s mind-set transformation.

In startup culture, nothing moves forward until it’s validated. Kidder and Wallace adapt this entrepreneurial methodology for corporations, teaching teams to prove the “commercial truth” behind an idea before building it. Validation is the bridge between imagination and market reality.

Three Seeds of Validation

Validation unfolds in three iterative stages: 1) discover the real customer problem, 2) test multiple solutions, and 3) prove a scalable business model. Like kneading dough, each cycle of testing makes the idea stronger. Experiments move from interviews and prototypes to landing pages, Wizard-of-Oz tests, and even pre-sales where customers pay before a product exists.

Painkillers, Not Vitamins

The authors emphasize that valuable ideas solve acute pain. Fitbit’s wearable tech, for example, turned out to be a “vitamin”—interesting but not indispensable. Nike’s Easy Kicks subscription for kids’ shoes, on the other hand, was a “painkiller” solving a persistent parental headache. High-growth ideas solve chronic pain points with exponential benefit.

Proprietary Gifts and 10X Solutions

Every company has unique capabilities—its “proprietary gifts.” Amazon’s fulfillment network is one such gift, enabling two-day delivery that redefined e-commerce. Combining these gifts with the pursuit of “10X impact”—solutions ten times better than existing options—creates unfair advantage.

“Whoever learns fastest wins. Validation speeds learning while reducing cost.”

When enterprises adopt startup validation, they save millions by killing unviable assumptions early. Through test-and-learn cycles, corporate teams rediscover the entrepreneurial humility to ask, experiment, and learn from reality—not from PowerPoint.

Discovery and validation are half the growth equation; investment completes it. Kidder introduces the Growth Board—a venture fund inside the enterprise that funds internal startups with staged capital, like VC rounds. Its mission: allocate resources to ideas proving commercial truth while killing zombies early.

The Growth Board in Action

GE’s Oil & Gas division pioneered this approach. CEO Lorenzo Simonelli replaced annual budget entitlements with venture-style milestones. Projects earned funding based on evidence, not rank or tradition. Within three years, product cycles became 70% faster and costs dropped by 80%. Leadership replaced bureaucracy with entrepreneurial discipline.

Portfolios and the Power Law

In venture capital, most investments fail—but a few yield outsized returns. Correlation Ventures found 60% of VC returns come from just 6% of investments. This asymmetry means enterprises must diversify their bets. Multiple small projects, each tested quickly, maximize learning and increase odds of discovering the winners.

Role of the CEO and External Venture Partner

Successful Growth Boards are personally led by the CEO (nondelegable) and include an External Venture Partner—an experienced entrepreneur who brings independent perspective and helps executives question their biases. Without the outsider’s eye, the board slips back into corporate groupthink. (This parallels Adam Grant’s concept of “creative outsiders” who see possibilities insiders miss.)

“Big to Bigger metrics like ROI don’t apply here. Growth Boards invest not in certainty, but in discovery.”

With this structure, enterprises learn to fund ideas the way VCs do: in rapid cycles, with evidence-based decision-making and courage to kill or double down. It transforms corporate governance from control to creation.

Once the Growth OS proves its worth, how do you make it permanent? Kidder and Wallace devote the later chapters to building enduring systems, talent, and culture that keep discovery alive. Growth must become a capability, not a seasonal project.

Phased Installation

Implementation happens in three phases. Phase 1 pilots the system with one or two Opportunity Areas, supported by a small Ops Team of “roadblock busters.” Phase 2 expands into additional business units, adding Growth Boards at different levels and diversifying bets. Phase 3 scales the system enterprise-wide—the company now runs ambidextrously, managing both Big to Bigger and New to Big simultaneously.

The D10X Case Study

Citigroup’s D10X program demonstrates this evolution. Launched by Debby Hopkins and later led by Vanessa Colella, D10X used small Growth Boards to fund intrapreneurial ideas. Over time it trained hundreds of employees, hired entrepreneurs as coaches, and spun out startups like Proxymity—a digital voting platform revolutionizing proxy processes for investors. Within three years, Citi was launching dozens of new ventures annually.

Culture and Coaching

Permanent capability requires culture change. Employees must see innovation as normal, not exceptional. Coaching networks and transparent communication keep experimentation safe and scalable. Leaders must treat failure as evidence, not error, and reward teams for learning faster. Over time, the Growth OS becomes “always-on.”

“If you want repeatable growth, don’t just fish—build the machine that lets you fish forever.”

By making discovery, validation, and investment structural capabilities rather than isolated projects, companies turn innovation from theater into a permanent engine of progress.

The final message of New to Big is a rallying cry: stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. Kidder and Wallace argue that most corporations operate defensively—protecting efficiency, avoiding risk, and surviving disruption—while startups attack opportunities head-on. Fortune 500 enterprises can win again if they learn offense.

The Mindset Shift

A study of soccer penalty shoots from Top Dog illustrates this. Players kick with 92% success when winning is at stake, but only 62% when losing looms. The same skill, different mindset. Corporate teams too often play “not to lose”—waiting for consensus, minimizing risk, demanding forecasts. Growth leaders play “to win”—investing boldly, chasing real customer problems, and learning at full speed.

Refounders and the Day One Culture

Refounders like Satya Nadella demonstrate offensive leadership. By shifting Microsoft from legacy software toward AI, cloud computing, and developer partnerships, Nadella turned the company into a growth machine. His mantra—“If you don’t jump on the new, you don’t survive”—perfectly captures the offensive spirit the book demands.

Big Companies Have Secret Weapons

Contrary to myth, startups don’t hold monopoly on innovation. Established enterprises have unmatched assets—loyal customers, global supply chains, cash reserves, and brands. When activated through the Growth OS, these assets become unfair advantages. A company like P&G can scale a validated new idea faster than any startup ever could.

“Big used to beat little; today, fast beats big. But nothing beats big and fast together.”

Going on offense means embracing ambition, acting with entrepreneurial urgency, and using corporate scale for social good—from sustainable supply chains to accessible finance. It’s both a growth strategy and a leadership philosophy: play to win, and make the future happen sooner.