The Art of Permanent Reinvention

Aidan McCullen: Author, Consultant, and Host of the Podcast The Innovation Show

When it comes to reinvention, Aidan McCullen speaks from personal experience. A former pro rugby player in France and Ireland, McCullen went on to build a successful career as a business consultant, author, and host of the popular podcast The Innovation Show.

McCullen’s philosophy, presented in his book Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organizations, and Life, instructs on how to develop a resilient mindset by seeking ways to always learn and grow by embracing change. His podcast seeks to enlighten his audience by challenging them to think differently.

McCullen has worked with such clients as Mastercard, Epic Games, CBC Canada, and Toyota. A popular lecturer, he was chosen as a keynote speaker for the European Congress on October 21 in Barcelona.

Based in Dublin, McCullen teaches a course on Emerging Technology Trends at world-famous Trinity College Business School. On April 29-30, 2025, he’ll launch his first Reinvention Summit in Dublin, featuring such speakers as author and consultant Seth Godin and Charles Conn, former CEO and current chair of Patagonia.

CBI: How did you transition from rugby player to an innovation thought leader?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: I put it down to discipline. Discipline and curiosity. People think I’m joking about this, but I wasn’t the best sports player. The way I got to play in rugby was really interesting. I went to France to learn French, and I read in a paper that a specific town was in crisis because it had lost all its rugby players during this season. Even though they were still division one, all their top players got poached by top clubs.

I thought, “There’s an opportunity,” so I wrote to them, and I ended up going there and playing professional rugby for the year. My motivation was to learn a new brand of rugby and to speak French, and I ended up with this amazing start to a new bend in my life when at first I wasn’t sure where it was going to go.

After I came home, I got offers from three clubs in Ireland, but I was determined to finish my education. I decided I would go the unusual route and study German, French, and business, and then and only then would I play rugby. I didn’t want to do what so many people before me had done where they give all their life to a sport with no backup plan.

But it all came down to discipline. Almost anybody who’s ever played with me will say that they’ve never played with somebody as disciplined as me. That discipline was with me my entire career.

CBI: Where does that discipline come from?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: I definitely think that you can develop it. This goes back to being that kid who was not a very good athlete and was the last picked at school. But I always showed up and, eventually, I started to get good at it. I played multiple sports, often riding the pine at first, and then all of a sudden I started to get picked, and then I became the better player on the team. Then I started training more to improve myself, because it started that positive feedback loop. So there was a little bit of ego, where people were noticing me, and then I put in more effort, more energy, more discipline, and got more out of it. That experience helped me notice things that other people might not, because I’m always learning and looking at different perspectives.

CBI: How did you get into communications?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: I went into a traditional media business—again, this was luck, not by choice. And like most businesses in ‘08, they didn’t have a clue about digital.

I was working for free—I was an unpaid intern at 31—following this guy around, and I realized that he was just learning on the fly. I started to do the exact same thing I did in sport where I showed up, did the work and the research, and learned the job. Eventually this guy gets let go, and I told them I could do the job. Because I wasn’t paid nearly as much as the person I replaced, they gave me a chance.

That set me on a path in digital transformation. I did that for nearly a decade. Then I went into innovation, because I could see that once you have a business digitalized the next thing is actually innovation and trying to bring in new ways of thinking. I did that for another three years.

At some point I realized that you can come up with the best strategy in the world, but if somebody doesn’t do anything with it, it’s going to sit in a desk and it’s just going to be an expensive piece of paper. And I kept seeing people spend a few hundred grand on something and not do anything with it. That’s when I got into leadership and transformation culture. It’s from these experiences that I decided to write my book.

CBI: How did that lead to you becoming a thought leader and to your podcast, The Innovation Show?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: I was headhunted by a national broadcaster here, probably equivalent to NPR in the U.S., because it’s funded by the government. They hired me as head of innovation, but I didn’t actually get to innovate, because my ideas were being blocked. I was so bored and unfulfilled, so I launched The Innovation Show. It’s now in its eighth year and I’ve done more than 550 episodes.

This is where the thought leadership piece came from. I have to make sacrifices here and there. It takes me a hell of a lot of time, but I read the book of every interview guest. They know I’ve done my homework, and they always tell me that I’m the first podcaster who’s ever actually read the book. With many podcasters, the podcast is about the host, it’s not about the guest. My drive was that I wanted to learn everything the guest can teach me in this hour and a half that we have together, and share it with the listener.

CBI: What does your philosophy of “permanent reinvention” mean?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: I once wrote this article, “The Stem Cell Mindset.” It was about the way the stem cell works, and how you can make it do whatever you want it to do. I found out that ant populations have this ability where a worker ant can be reprogrammed to be a warrior ant or a forager. And foragers are older ants, and the reason they’re older ants is that it doesn’t matter if they get killed, because they’ve already contributed towards the larger population. But they also have more knowledge. I love that as a metaphor. You have this reprogrammable method within yourself, so you can unlearn and relearn quickly.

You can learn to let go of that identity that you used to have.

That’s the idea of permanent reinvention.

From a work perspective, you may have established a career for yourself, but you need to be able to spot when that career is coming to an end and be proactive about learning new skills before the carpet’s swept from under your feet.

Because when the rug’s pulled out from under your feet, it’s your fault for not seeing it coming. If you wait until the crisis, it’s too late, because you’re going to be in a state of panic, and you’re not going to have the skills that you could have been developing while you were enjoying your success of your previous incarnation.

That’s the heart of it. My mission is to encourage people to go for it. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out, because you’ll still learn something from it.

CBI: I do see parallels to the fitness world. At the European Congress, you’ll be addressing some of the top European professionals in the fitness space. What will be your message to them?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: The talk will be called, “Undisruptable, a Mindset of Permanent Reinvention.” One of my favorite sports metaphors is describing how you create resilience in your body by putting it through some type of destruction. When you lift heavy weights, such as a squat or deadlift, you’re actually creating micro-trauma in the muscle tissue and bone. Then the muscle and bone remodels itself.

That’s voluntary stress, and it builds resilience. You have to apply that to business.

Just as you force yourself off the couch to go to the gym, you need to proactively look to add voluntary stress in your business. You need to look at new business models, bring in people with different mindsets into the business, have people challenge you in a respectful way.

CBI: How do you specifically invite voluntary stress into your business?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: What I talk about in my book is that businesses become victims of their own success. They look at new ideas as a waste of corporate time and energy. “When will it be profitable?”

So they stockpile cash and don’t invest in R&D at all, or they invest incrementally and then label it as true innovation, but it’s just business as usual.

This is what I call the “success trap,” where it’s difficult to spot potential in the early stages. One example is Nokia.

Three years before the iPhone ever graced the stage in California with Steve Jobs, Nokia had developed one. It was presented to the management team.

So was an iPad, though they didn’t call it that. They even had an idea for an app store. It was presented as a new business model. Of course, management saw this as, “We’re making a fortune. Why would we spend corporate energy and time?” Consultants told them, “Apple is going to damage their brand by going with the iPhone.” They shuttered these projects and continued to stay with what they were doing.

This is another bias called escalation of commitment. They’ll double down on what they do well. This is the thing about permanent reinvention—Nokia stopped reinventing, even though some people in the company said, “Our customers want different things. They want a smartphone.”

CBI: What trends do you see emerging?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: Anybody who says they’re a futurist always gets it wrong, but they move on before it actually manifests. I get it—I struggle with markets.

People don’t take the time to understand things anymore. People rarely read. They want the short version of everything. My show is an hour and 30 minutes per episode, and the biggest criticism I get from people is that it’s too long. They say, “I’m so busy.” Yes, you may be busy doing the wrong thing. You need to take time to learn where your business is going. Very few of them do, because they rarely study their own businesses. I find this incredible.

When I work with a company, the first thing I say is, “I don’t have any answers for you. I have questions to provoke you to come up with the answers to get you to think in a different neural pathway, so you think in an innovative way and come up with insights.”

I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable about the future, but you should always be learning and adapting. With AI, for example, there’s a meme going around at the moment that says you won’t be replaced by AI, you’ll be replaced by a human who works with AI. I lecture in Trinity College, and for years I’ve been telling students to learn how to use AI, and encourage them to use it to create essays and assignments. They thought it was entrapment, but if you don’t learn how to use it, you'll fall behind.

CBI: In our industry, we always talk about the 80% of people who never enter a fitness facility. How would you try motivate those people?

AIDAN MCCULLEN: There's a Chinese proverb that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. I think the same thing applies to health. It's never too late to get started, and it's essential for old age to exercise. If you have never lifted a weight before you’re 50 and you start to lift weights, you will get better growth than I will, because my body's used to it.

You have to shake people up but in an empathetic way. We are living longer lifespans, but that doesn't mean our health spans are better. You may live to be 90, but the last 20 years will be terrible. If people know that, I think they’ll take action.

You don't want to be a burden and you don't want to regret not taking action sooner. As Jim Rohn, the famous speaker, said: "We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons."

Interested in attending the 21st European Congress in Barcelona? Learn more and register!

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Club Business International. View the full digital version of the issue online.