One of the most insightful business thinkers on LinkedIn holds a Professorship funded by a toy company.

Howard Yu holds the LEGO® Chair of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School in Lausanne, a title that sounds playful until you understand that it funds one of the most rigorous corporate research programmes in the world. But Yu believes that the principles that shape billion-dollar corporations apply just as much to small teams and solo entrepreneurs. 

Most LinkedIn “experts” have opinions. Howard Yu has data, factory visits, and 25 hours of research behind every post. With every company he studies he asks who is building the capabilities that will matter in five years. It is why, on a platform drowning in recycled frameworks and personal-brand content, his feed is truly worth reading.

He earned his doctorate from Harvard Business School, spent formative years in Hong Kong banking, and in 2023 received the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. Yu believes in the power of shared learning, and beyond his contributions to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes and many others, and brings practical frameworks, behind-the-scenes stories and hard-won lessons about how companies and individuals achieve greatness in his Substack newsletter, One Inch Ahead.

The latest in our BlueSky Thinking series, The Influencers explores some of Howard Yu’s most compelling ideas.

The Research To Be Ready For Everything

Yu directs IMD’s Center for Future Readiness, which publishes the Future Readiness Indicator, a tracker of more than 300 companies across seven sectors, designed not to confirm what already happened but to flag what’s coming. Traditional metrics like market share or share price tell you who won the last race. Yu’s team uses a composite of forward-looking proxies – R&D intensity, the speed of innovation deployment, patent trajectories, geographic expansion patterns, even the language executives use on earnings calls – to identify who will win the next one.

The result is a dataset that keeps producing counterintuitive findings. When conventional wisdom said Tesla was untouchable, Yu’s indicator was already tracking BYD’s ascent. When everyone was still debating whether the EV transition was real, his research was asking which car companies had built the capability architecture to survive it.

That rigour shows in everything he writes and posts.

The Story Most People Missed About BYD and Tesla

In 2011, a Bloomberg TV host asked Elon Musk whether BYD could ever challenge Tesla. Musk laughed. “Have you seen their car?” he scoffed.

Yu has spent considerable time on this story, and his analysis is a precise account of how the reversal happened. By April 2025, BYD had outsold Tesla in Europe for the first time, despite facing higher tariff rates. The global gap had closed to roughly 30,000 vehicles worldwide in 2024.

What Yu identifies is the strategic logic that others missed. BYD didn’t start with a glamorous electric sedan. It started with phone batteries for Nokia and Motorola in the 1990s, then moved to e-bikes and scooters in southern Chinese cities, then to commercial buses, then to taxi fleets. Each rung was unglamorous. Each rung was a learning platform.

When launching its first consumer electric vehicle, BYD wasn’t leaping into EVs like a startup, the company was extending a system of capabilities it had spent fifteen years perfecting. “In an industry obsessed with chasing the next big thing,” he explains, “BYD focused on mastering the boring stuff first.”

The contrast with Tesla is pointed. At Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, Yu’s IMD colleague Mark Greeven observed a line worker writing C++ code on the factory floor. At BYD’s Shenshan plant, which is four and a half times the footprint of Tesla’s Shanghai facility, the emphasis is different: vertical integration taken to its logical extreme. BYD designs its own chips through BYD Semiconductor, operates battery lines with one-fifth the labour of a typical Western plant, and is building a greenfield megacampus in Zhengzhou planned to cover nearly fifty square miles.

Where Tesla encourages line workers to code, BYD emphasises executional excellence, vertical integration, and scientific precision. While Musk made headlines, Wang built everything else. The future wasn’t hyped into existence, it was engineered. 

The Xiaomi Story Is Even More Instructive

Yu’s long essay on Xiaomi’s collapse and comeback is one of the best pieces of business journalism published on Substack in 2025. In summer 2016, Xiaomi – once China’s leading smartphone brand – had fallen to fifth place. Shipments had crashed from 70 million units in 2015 to 41 million. The press coined a word for it, “unicorpse.” The fallen unicorn.

No company had ever clawed its way back after losing that much ground. Not Sony Ericsson, not Motorola, and not HTC.

What Yu traces is how CEO Lei Jun rebuilt by going back to first principles – expanding into offline retail, developing an ecosystem of hardware products around the phone, and then, astonishingly, deciding to build an electric car. On March 28, 2024, Lei Jun walked on stage with the Xiaomi SU7. Ten thousand orders arrived in the first four minutes. The entire 2024 production run sold out within a day.

The takeaway Yu draws from all of this is not a feel-good story about resilience. It’s a structural lesson: the companies that survive disruption are the ones that treat each adjacency as a capability-building exercise, not a diversification bet.

Why America Is Anxious and China Is Optimistic

One of Yu’s most-shared pieces of work is built around a single Ipsos scatter plot. The chart maps global emotional responses to artificial intelligence on two axes: excitement and nervousness. The world splits into two distinct clusters. The United States and much of Western Europe sit in the high-anxiety quadrant. China and its Asian neighbours sit in the optimistic one.

Most commentators treat this as a geopolitical or ideological difference. Yu treats it as a sociological one. When people answer the question “How do you feel about AI?” they aren’t talking about software. They are asking: when this wave hits, who does it lift? 

His reading of the divergence is anchored in lived experience rather than policy. American distrust of AI, he argues, is downstream of a longer pattern – platform companies that won users’ trust and then systematically extracted value from them. He traces this through the story of Douglas Mrdeza, a Michigan barber who built a $25 million business selling on Amazon, only to watch Amazon’s take climb from 19 cents on the dollar in 2014 to 46 cents by the time his company filed for bankruptcy. Once trust collapses, every innovation arrives pre-loaded with suspicion. Every “We’re here to help” sounds like a con. 

Chinese optimism, by contrast, is grounded in visible infrastructure. China’s optimism is largely a lived experience. It is waking up to new skylines, new trains and bridges, and new gadgets in your hand. Yu cites California’s bullet train,approved in 2008 with not a single passenger on board sixteen years later, against China’s Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, approved the same year and completed in three years.

His conclusion is not pro-China. The belief about who captures the value of progress shows up as fear or excitement long before anyone fully understands a new technology. It’s a referendum on whether people feel invited into the future or not.

The practical implication for business leaders shouldn’t be ignored: “How do we deploy AI in a way that makes people believe the future includes them? Because no one can market their way out of deep distrust.”

The Two Boxes

Yu’s practical framework for business teams is simple enough to run in 25 minutes. He calls it the Two Boxes exercise.

Box One is your core competency – what you’re great at right now, what pays the bills today. Box Two is your capability stack – the skills you’re building for five years from now. Most organisations spend all their energy polishing Box One. Kodak and Blockbuster were masters of their core competency. They just forgot to build new capability stacks.

The exercise asks teams one question: what is one capability our industry will absolutely need in five years, and we must start building today? Howard Yu shares concrete examples. Yamaha went from acoustic pianos to digital keyboards to music software. BYD went from phone batteries to e-bikes to buses to cars. Novartis went from dye-making to drug-making. The companies that endured weren’t the ones with the best strategy documents. They were the ones that stacked adjacent capabilities before they needed them.

Stop perfecting, start collecting.

The instruction is in that one line.

The best way to engage with Howard Yu’s work is to treat it as a research briefing rather than a motivational feed. Here’s a practical approach:

Follow the Substack first. His newsletter One Inch Ahead (howardyu.substack.com) is where the long-form research lives. Each piece takes many hours to produce and it shows. 

Track the Future Readiness Indicator. Published at imd.org, the indicator covers automotive, pharma, tech, and fashion. It gives you something specific to anchor a conversation around – a ranking with methodology, not a hunch.

Watch for his chart-driven LinkedIn posts. Yu uses data visualisations the way good journalists use quotes – to illustrate an argument, not decorate it. When he posts a chart, it’s worth pausing to understand what it’s measuring.

Read his book. LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied makes the case that sustainable competitive advantage comes not from proprietary information or unique assets, but from the accumulation of interdisciplinary knowledge – the kind that competitors can’t replicate quickly. 

One Inch Ahead

The title of Yu’s newsletter is the best summary of his philosophy. He’s not promising ten-year visions or moonshots. He’s describing what durable companies actually do. They stay one increment ahead of the question their industry hasn’t thought to ask yet.

That’s worth your time. Much LinkedIn content isn’t.

About the author

Matt Symonds is Chief Editor of BlueSky Thinking, and host of BlueSky Media Connect, bringing together b-schools and universities to meet editors from FT, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist, NYTimes and other global / regional media.

He is the S of QS, co-founding QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publishers of the QS World University Rankings. Matt I also co-Founder and Director of Fortuna Admissions, a coaching dream team of former business school and university admissions professionals from top-tier institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS, Chicago Booth, Columbia, Northwestern Kellogg, Berkeley Haas.

Matt co-host the CentreCourt MBA & Masters Festivals with John A. Byrne and Poets & Quants. Author of the international bestseller, “Getting the MBA Admissions Edge” sponsored by Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, he writes about Higher Education and management for BBC, Times of India and formerly Forbes, The Economist and Bloomberg.

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