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The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast
The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast brings you conversations with global executives who lead strategy to share their unique experiences in tackling complex challenges, navigating disruptive technologies, and driving impactful growth.
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The Chief Strategy Officer Podcast
#25—The Icarus Principle: Why Stability Is the Strategy Trap: Claudio Finol
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Joining us this episode is Claudio Finol, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at Fyffes — one of the world's leading fresh produce companies, owned by Japan's Sumitomo Corporation. An engineer by training with an MBA from Alliance Manchester Business School, where he also teaches, Claudio has led innovation and strategy across Chiquita, Danone, FrieslandCampina, and McBride. He brings a rare cross-industry lens to the discipline — part academic, part practitioner — and a conviction that strategy should sit far closer to execution than most strategy offices allow. In this conversation, we explore why the pursuit of stability, the very thing most strategy functions are built to deliver, may be the hidden weakness that brings an organisation down.
Things we will cover:
The Icarus principle applied to strategy, and why over-reliance on stability is more dangerous than over-reliance on strength
Why adaptability is less about managing change and more about constantly challenging the assumptions beneath every plan
The tension between efficiency and resilience, and why real resilience demands a degree of redundancy by design
The "velocity of risk" — not just how big a threat is, but how fast it can surface, from steady regulation to a blind side like DeepSeek
How to reframe risk as opportunity, and why the risk function and strategy function need to work in concert
Reconciling a fast-moving external environment with long-horizon ownership expectations
The Chief Strategy Officer as "chief reminder officer" — keeper of a living, adaptive process rather than the executor of a fixed plan
From the Icarus principle to the chief reminder officer, Claudio draws on experience across some of the world's best-known consumer and industrial brands to make a grounded case that the real work of strategy is never finished — because the assumptions underneath every plan are always shifting.
Episode Timeline:
Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudiofinol/
Fyffes: https://www.fyffes.com
Learn more about Outthinker's community of chief strategy officers - https://outthinker.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/outthinker-networks
Thank you to our guest Claudio Finol for such a thoughtful and genuinely practical conversation.
- Learn more about Outthinker's community of chief strategy officers - https://outthinker.com/
- Follow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/outthinker-networks
