60 seconds with yavnika khanna: “sometimes ingenuity means finding a radically better way to do something.”

I remember my last evening in Vienna in November 2018. After a week of events and dinners and conversations at the Global Peter Drucker Forum and Drucker Challenge, I ran into my Drucker friend Yavnika Khanna at Vienna’s famous Café Central. The whole week had been a blur. It was late, bitterly cold, and I remember Yavnika giving me a hug and saying: We have to stay in touch. 

And we did. Since then, we’ve worked together, served clients together, traded ideas, and stayed connected across years and across the country. I think about Yavnika and her family almost every morning: a collaged corgi picture her daughter made for me and my corgi, Winnie, lives right next to my coffee maker.

Yavnika is one of the smartest women I know. She thinks deeply about organizations, leadership, innovation, technology and, maybe most interestingly, how humans make choices when the world around them is changing.

Because I like sharing what smart people are thinking about, I’m happy for you to meet her in this week’s Q&A, the first in our series of Q&As celebrating the Global Peter Drucker Forum and the people I know through it. 

– meg

toth shop (ts): In 10 words or less, tell us what you do and what you're thinking about these days.

Yavnika Khanna (YK): I turn complexity into choices that mobilize organizations through change. 

ts: Tell us a little bit about your experience with the Drucker Forum and the Drucker Challenge. What’s the Peter Drucker quote or work that you will always carry the flag for? 

YK: My relationship with the Global Peter Drucker Forum spans more than a decade, beginning with a two-time win at the Drucker Challenge and evolving into eight years leading global press and media relations. 

What I value most about the Drucker Forum and Drucker Challenge community are the  various opportunities for global and intergenerational dialogue.

The Forum brings together people with deep experience in management, while the Challenge deliberately places younger voices, their questions, and their experience at the center of the conversation.

That matters to me because management ideas remain alive only when each generation can test them against a different economic, technological, and social reality. Younger people shouldn't simply inherit established thinking. They should question it, reinterpret it, and tell us where it no longer explains the world they are entering.

I value the relationship because Drucker gives us enduring questions; every generation has to answer them against the reality it is actually living.

The Drucker work I keep returning to is Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I’m drawn to his view of innovation as a discipline: paying attention to where reality has shifted, recognizing what that shift makes possible, and then acting on it. This is the heart of the practice of entrepreneurship for me. 

But there is another Drucker idea that has always stayed with me, perhaps because I have spent much of my own career in marketing: business has two basic functions: marketing and innovation.

I think there is enormous depth in that pairing. Innovation asks, what new value can we create? Marketing asks, for whom does that value matter, and how will they recognize it? Neither works particularly well without the other.

And that feels especially relevant now. Technology is dramatically expanding what we are capable of creating. The harder questions are becoming: What is worth creating? For whom? And what value does it actually produce?

ts: When you hear the Drucker Forum’s theme about "next-generation innovation," what does it mean to you, and what distinguishes it from innovation as we've traditionally understood it?

YK: We are quickly moving from an era where technical capability was scarce to one where capability is increasingly abundant.

For much of modern business history, having access to the technology, expertise, capital, or infrastructure to build something new was itself an advantage.

AI changes that equation. More people can create, analyze, automate, and experiment at a speed that would have been extraordinary even a few years ago.

For leaders, that creates a different problem from “What can we build?” to “What deserves our attention, our resources, and our people?”

That means making choices about which problems matter, where technology genuinely improves an outcome, where human judgment remains essential, and what value we ultimately want the organization to create.

So when I think about next-generation innovation, I think less about the volume of new ideas and more about the quality of the choices behind them. When possibilities multiply, judgment becomes a leadership advantage.

ts: This year’s forum theme suggests that "everything depends on ingenuity." What do you believe depends most urgently on human ingenuity right now?

YK: Sometimes ingenuity means finding a radically better way to do something. Sometimes it means recognizing that the most intelligent decision is not to optimize it at all.

Leaders are being offered extraordinary opportunities to make organizations faster, leaner, more automated, and more predictive. Those opportunities involve real trade-offs. Every time we optimize something, we are making a choice about what we value: is it efficiency, cost, the human agency or is it the quality of the experience? 

You can make the wrong process extremely efficient. You can scale an incentive that produces the wrong behavior. You can automate a decision and discover later that the human judgment you removed was actually carrying much of the value.

So the leadership challenge is being purpose-driven about where we apply it and what outcome we are trying to create.

ts: Why is clear messaging essential to turning an innovative idea into something people can understand, trust, and adopt?

YK: People have limited attention and a healthy degree of skepticism. They need to understand what you are asking them to change and why that change is worth making.

When a team struggles to explain an innovation clearly, I start asking questions. Who exactly is it for? What changes for that person? Why does that change matter? Why would they choose this over continuing to do what they do today?

If those answers aren't clear, polishing the language won't solve the problem.

Clear messaging creates that bridge between what an organization believes it has invented and the value another person can actually recognize. 

ts: Every person we interview answers this same question last. Mile 18 is generally considered to be one of the hardest miles in a marathon. You're hitting a wall. You're forced to dig deep. What's Mile 18 in your line of work—or at a point in your career—and what do you tell yourself when you find yourself in the middle of a Mile 18?

YK: For me, Mile 18 is when reality starts challenging a decision you've already invested in.

That's a very different test from coming up with the original idea.

You may have put resources behind it. Other people may be depending on it. You may have advocated for it publicly. Then the customer feedback, the numbers, or the circumstances begin telling you that one of your assumptions may be wrong.

That's where leadership becomes uncomfortable, because changing your mind now has a cost.

I've learned to ask myself: am I defending the outcome we are trying to achieve, or am I defending the decision I made earlier?

Those are not the same thing. My responsibility is to the outcome, not to being proved right.

Sometimes the evidence tells you to stay the course. Sometimes it tells you to change direction. The hard part is having enough conviction to persist without allowing conviction to become attachment.

For me, that's Mile 18.