Faculty are active. Not archived.

Sensing · Seizing · Transforming

David J. Teece

The dynamic capabilities framework is his. Teece spent four decades studying why some firms sustain competitive advantage under rapid technological change while others do not. His answer — sense shifts in the environment, seize opportunities before competitors can, reconfigure the asset base when the old logic stops working — has been cited more than any other framework in the strategic management literature.

His 1986 paper “Profiting from Innovation” remains the canonical treatment of why technological pioneers so often lose to fast followers who control the complementary assets needed to commercialize. It reframed how executives think about intellectual property, vertical integration, and ecosystem strategy — none of those debates has moved past it.

In office hours, his twin works through a participant's own situation — not the textbook case. It asks: which of your current capabilities are sensing-oriented, which are seizing-oriented, and which are locking you into a configuration that made sense in 2019? It does not offer generic frameworks. It applies his diagnostic to what the participant actually described.

As Executive Chairman and faculty-of-record, Teece authors the curriculum, calibrates every rubric, and signs each certificate. His twin is the program's diagnostic backbone.

Ambidexterity · Congruence · Culture

Charles A. O'Reilly III

The hardest part of the Teece diagnosis is not sensing or seizing — it is transforming. Organizations resist reconfiguration because their culture, incentive structures, and reporting lines are precisely tuned to the old model. O'Reilly built the framework that explains why. Organizational ambidexterity is the capacity to exploit today's business while exploring tomorrow's — not sequentially, but simultaneously.

His congruence model of organizational alignment provides the diagnostic tool: strategy, culture, structure, and people must be congruent. When they are not, the firm's dynamic capabilities are theoretical — they exist on paper and fail in practice. O'Reilly's contribution is making transformation operational, not aspirational.

His twin in office hours focuses on the organizational diagnosis: which of your current structures are supporting the old model, which people are misaligned to the direction you have set, and what the congruence model says needs to shift before the capability investments will stick.

Participants who have already run a Teece capabilities audit use O'Reilly's framework to build the organizational case — not just the strategic one — for the changes they have identified.

Diagnosis · Guiding Policy · Coherent Action

Richard P. Rumelt

A dynamic capabilities diagnosis without a strategy is an intellectual exercise. Rumelt supplies the output format. His strategy kernel — a tight diagnosis of the critical challenge, a guiding policy that rules out most options, and coherent actions that reinforce each other — turns the sensing-seizing-transforming analysis into something a leadership team can actually execute.

His concept of bad strategy is as important as his prescription for good strategy. Bad strategy is not the absence of strategy — it is the presence of a list of goals masquerading as one. Most executive teams produce bad strategy not because they are incompetent but because the process rewards comprehensiveness over diagnosis. Rumelt's framework makes that error visible.

His twin in office hours works through the kernel for each participant's specific situation: what is the one critical challenge your organization actually faces — not the ten things on the strategic plan, the one — and does your current course of action hold together around addressing it?

Every participant in the flagship program leaves with a one-page strategy kernel for their own situation, stress-tested by Rumelt's twin across three office-hour sessions.

“Source-faithful. Not synthetic.”— from the Institute’s AI-faculty disclosure

Each faculty twin is constructed exclusively from the named scholar's published and recorded work: books, peer-reviewed papers, lectures, interviews, and public talks. The twin is not instructed to behave like the scholar in general — it is trained to reason from that scholar's specific intellectual commitments. When Teece's twin answers a question about capability development, it draws on the distinctions Teece actually draws, not on a generalized definition of the term.

A named human faculty-of-record supervises the program. The faculty-of-record authors the curriculum, sets the assessment rubrics, reviews a sample of AI responses each week, and signs every certificate. Participants may request a human faculty-of-record review of any AI-generated feedback at any time. That request is honored within three business days.

The twins do not generate opinions on questions outside the scholar's published positions. When a participant asks a question Teece has not addressed, the twin says so — and refers to the nearest relevant framework the scholar has documented. Silence on a question is not a failure mode; it is the model's honesty.

Each named scholar has consented to the Institute's use of their published work in this manner. The Institute maintains a right-of-publicity disclosure on file for each faculty twin and does not represent the twin as the scholar speaking in real time. The faculty card's “Active AI twin” indicator signals availability in office hours — not live human presence.

What office hours look like

Office hours are not a Q&A interface. The twin asks questions before it answers them. A participant arrives with a capability-gap question; the twin asks three clarifying questions about the participant's specific organizational context, sector, and the nature of the constraint they are facing. The response is then scoped to that context — not to the general case.

Sessions are recorded and available for review. Transcripts can be exported for use in written reflections and shared with sponsors or boards. The twin retains context across sessions within a cohort — it remembers what you described in Module 3 when you return in Module 7.

Three synchronous sessions with the full faculty-of-record panel — not AI — are part of every extended-format program. These are not webinars. Each session is a working session on a specific problem a participant has submitted in advance. The panel reviews the problem before the session and responds with the diagnostic they would apply.