Governance Meets Innovation: Unlocking Enterprise Value Through Executive Courage, Cultural Foresight, and Board Partnership
Coauthors: Richard Lefevre, CSM, PMP, MS and Stephanie Johnson, MPH, MBA, LSSMBB
In a global economy propelled by disruption and digitization, innovation has become both an aspiration and an imperative. Yet, in boardrooms across industries, particularly in the heavily regulated financial and healthcare sectors, “innovation” too often becomes a sanitized placeholder for incremental improvement, starved of real ambition and buried under layers of bureaucracy. Executives frequently ask for bold solutions but build systems that reward predictability over possibility. Meanwhile, boards demand transformation while clinging tightly to legacy governance structures ill-suited for the nonlinear dynamics of innovation.
The result? A landscape riddled with stalled initiatives, missed market opportunities, and cultural disengagement. As of 2024, 78% of CEOs report investing in innovation, but only 22% say they’re achieving significant results from those investments (PwC, 2024). The root cause lies not in capability, but in alignment, or the lack thereof.
The Central Question
Do boards really like innovation? The answer, if you read between the lines of most strategic off-sites and capital planning decks, is: only when it is safe, incremental, and controllable. But innovation by its very nature is neither safe nor easily controlled. It is a portfolio of risk, experimentation, and courageous recalibration.
The Innovation Illusion
In our experience advising and operating across complex matrixed environments, we’ve observed a pattern: organizations with board members who intellectually endorse innovation but lack a shared understanding of how to fund, govern, or operationalize it in practice. According to Deloitte (2023), 67% of board members acknowledge the importance of innovation, but only 31% are confident in their governance processes to manage innovation risk appropriately.
This gap creates two dangerous outcomes:
The Innovation Theater Trap: Teams present slide decks of ideas, rebranded as “transformation,” without alignment to enterprise strategy or accountability mechanisms. Projects are approved based on optics, not outcomes.
The Invisible Saboteur: The CEO declares a transformation agenda, but when real disruption begins, be it in budgeting, structure, or prioritization, resistance arises not from the frontline, but from the top.
In the words of renowned organizational theorist Karl Weick, “Organizations are kept in motion by a reluctance to admit that they are adrift.”
Building an Innovation-Enabled Governance Structure
To be clear: innovation does not require the abandonment of governance. Rather, it demands the modernization of it. To unlock enterprise value, boards and executives must replace traditional linear planning with portfolio-based innovation governance that balances agility with fiduciary duty.
At the core of this approach are three interlocking mechanisms:
1. Executive Foresight, Not Just Forecasting
Boards must be equipped to interpret market signals and emerging technologies not just in terms of compliance or cost, but in terms of future growth. This requires retooling board education, as only 18% of board members in financial services report receiving structured briefings on disruptive technologies (McKinsey, 2023).
2. Dynamic Capital Allocation
Rather than locking annual budgets in January, leading organizations reallocate capital dynamically based on signal-driven decision frameworks. Amazon famously reallocates 80% of its digital transformation budget every six months based on performance indicators and emergent trends (Harvard Business Review, 2022).
3. Cultural Fluency Across the C-Suite
Transformation cannot be delegated to “the tech team.” Real innovation occurs when CFOs, CHROs, COOs, and Chief Innovation or Technology Officers co-create change. In firms like DBS Bank and Cleveland Clinic, cross-functional teams supported by a unified enterprise PMO drove digital and patient-centered transformation ahead of industry peers.
Companies Getting It Right
DBS Bank (Singapore): With its “GANDALF” digital transformation strategy, DBS moved from laggard to global digital leader in under five years, with 99% of its services digital-ready and a 43% increase in ROE (McKinsey, 2023).
Cleveland Clinic: Integrated innovation into its board oversight structure, creating metrics that tied innovation to patient outcomes, resulting in a 25% reduction in patient readmissions (NEJM Catalyst, 2023).
Salesforce: Uses its V2MOM system to align board, executive, and team goals across innovation pipelines. The outcome: 27% higher innovation ROI than peers (Gartner, 2024).
Spotify: Balances decentralized team innovation with centralized platform governance, resulting in rapid release cycles and 85% customer satisfaction scores (Forrester, 2023).
Roche Pharmaceuticals: Created an “Innovation Council” reporting to the board to evaluate early-stage investments and product pipelines, accelerating time-to-market by 30% (BCG, 2023).
What Must Change Now
Too many boards ask, “Can we afford innovation?” The more appropriate question is: Can we afford irrelevance?
Executives must stop treating boardrooms as obstacle courses and begin treating them as innovation multipliers. This starts with shifting the board’s role from mere stewards of oversight to co-authors of value creation. Conversely, boards must be willing to embrace calculated risk, fund multi-year strategies, and support innovation leaders through uncertainty, not abandon them the moment the financial forecast wobbles.
This means:
Embedding innovation metrics into board dashboards alongside EBITDA and net promoter scores.
Recruiting board members with operational innovation experience, not just industry prestige.
Making executive performance reviews contingent not just on delivery, but on experimentation, learning velocity, and cross-functional alignment.
Unlocking Value Through Partnership
True innovation cannot exist in a vacuum. It requires a leadership architecture that fuses vision with action, ambition with governance, and experimentation with fiscal responsibility. The most successful organizations are those where the board, CEO, and executive leaders coalesce around one audacious belief: that the future belongs not to those with the best technology, but to those with the most coordinated courage.
In today’s environment of rapid disruption and compressed innovation cycles, boards and CEOs are increasingly expected to act not only as fiduciaries but also as strategic accelerants. According to Harvard Business Review, high-performing boards are shifting their focus from oversight to co-creation of value, embedding innovation into core governance priorities rather than treating it as a siloed function. This pivot requires a more dynamic operating rhythm; one that moves beyond quarterly reporting to foster continuous strategy calibration, risk sensing, and organizational agility. However, CEOs alone cannot shoulder this complexity, especially as stakeholder demands, regulatory scrutiny, and technology adoption accelerate.
This is where the dual value of a Chief of Staff and a corporate strategist becomes critical. A Chief of Staff serves as a force multiplier to the CEO, managing the executive operating cadence, aligning cross-functional initiatives, and translating board-level priorities into execution-ready actions. Simultaneously, an embedded strategist brings analytical rigor and scenario planning to the C-suite, enabling real-time decision support on innovative investments, partnerships, and market pivots. Together, these roles help bridge the gap between boardroom ambition and operational reality; ensuring that innovation is not just encouraged but executed with clarity, velocity, and measurable impact. In essence, they provide the connective tissue that aligns vision with value, enabling boards and CEOs to lead through complexity rather than react to it.
Why Richard Lefevre and Stephanie Johnson Are Your Next Transformational Leaders
Richard Lefevre brings to the table a formidable portfolio of leadership across healthcare, financial services, and innovation-centered transformation, where complexity is the rule, not the exception. His strategic fluency has been forged in the crucible of real-world challenges, merging empathy with enterprise, and compliance with creativity. At Sanford Health, Richard orchestrated a $179M merger across 26 states under budget and ahead of schedule, balancing regulatory precision with cultural continuity. He spearheaded a systemwide Medicaid Advantage program launch while driving enterprise-wide audits to 100% compliance, threading innovation directly through government-mandated guardrails. More recently, he rationalized a $40M fintech software portfolio using Gartner’s TIME model, delivering 19% projected IT cost savings, without the cost of Apptio, by aligning capital allocation with strategic intent. Richard’s leadership style is grounded, direct, and people-focused; he knows how to lift teams in moments of burnout, build clarity in ambiguity, and drive transformation that resonates from the boardroom to the back office. He is not simply a change agent, he is an orchestrator of institutional evolution. If your organization is in need of an executive who understands how to make complexity executable, restore morale, and deliver measurable results without compromising values, Richard is ready to lead.
Stephanie Johnson, MPH, MBA, LSSMBB is a globally respected operator whose leadership experience spans across public health systems, multinational strategy portfolios, and enterprise PMOs at the intersection of governance, growth, and innovation. With a distinguished track record of elevating organizations in healthcare, government, and commercial sectors, Stephanie’s work is characterized by a rare blend of academic precision and operational tenacity. She has led cross-border delivery systems, launched major regulatory and digital transformation initiatives, and stood up operational frameworks that reduced cycle time while increasing institutional trust. As a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt with a master’s degree in public health and business, she brings methodical rigor to every transformation, without ever losing sight of people. Her ability to embed agility into compliance-heavy ecosystems has earned her recognition not only as a leader, but as a builder of cultures that sustain long after the project is done. Stephanie is the kind of executive who doesn’t just meet deliverables, she reshapes the way organizations define success. If your enterprise is seeking a leader who blends sharp intellect with human-centered change and knows how to bridge strategic vision with operational cadence, Stephanie is the executive partner you want in the seat.
Both leaders are proven architects of transformation, but their value lies not in theory, it lies in the executional muscle, ethical clarity, and enterprise-level impact they bring to every organization they serve. They do not just advocate for innovation; they design it, defend it, and deliver it with rigor, humility, and measurable returns.
If your organization is ready to lead, not just manage, if you are seeking a steward of vision who can build systems that endure and cultures that believe, Richard or Stephanie are ready to help you shape what’s next.
Bibliography (APA Format)
BCG. (2023). The Innovation Engine at Roche: A Case Study. Boston Consulting Group.
Deloitte. (2023). Board Practices Quarterly: Governing Innovation. Deloitte Insights.
Forrester. (2023). Spotify’s Model for Scalable Innovation. Forrester Research.
Gartner. (2024). Innovation ROI Benchmarks Across S&P 500 Firms. Gartner Group.
Harvard Business Review. (2022). Dynamic Budgeting for Disruption. Harvard Business Publishing.
McKinsey & Company. (2023). Digital Transformation in Financial Services. McKinsey Insights.
NEJM Catalyst. (2023). Innovating for Outcomes: The Cleveland Clinic Model. NEJM Catalyst.
PwC. (2024). CEO Survey: Innovation Confidence Index. PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Salesforce. (2023). The V2MOM Framework for Enterprise Alignment. Salesforce Blog.
Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly.
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