Linda K. Yates

2022

Linda Yates is the founder and CEO of Mach49, the leading growth incubator for global businesses. She is a seasoned CEO with over 25 years of experience creating global strategy and driving innovation for large multinationals around the world. A native of Silicon Valley, Linda helps global enterprises beat the startups at their own game. She spent a decade as a member of the Board of Directors for NYSE-traded Sybase Inc. (now SAP) and has been a board member and advisor to many entrepreneurs and private companies. Linda was previously CEO of Strategos, pioneering the field of Corporate Innovation with Co-Founder and Chairman, Professor Gary Hamel. She is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute.

Inside every company is a portfolio of game-changing new ventures waiting to be unleashed.

In The Unicorn Within, Linda Yates, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley–based Mach49, the world's leading growth incubator for the Global 1000, argues that to thrive, companies can and must harness their power—their ideas, talent, data, cash, resources, channels, and customers—to build a portfolio of game-changing ventures and beat the startups at their own game.

In this all-in-one guide, Yates lays out a comprehensive twelve-week program, proven in scores of the world's largest companies, for doing all of the above: building a team and finding customer pain points; creating new products or services; developing a rigorous business and execution plan; and launching, accelerating, and scaling each venture. And then doing it again and again.

Best of all, Yates offers a guide relevant to everyone, from the growth-minded C-suite senior executive to the ambitious, creative intrapreneur, as she covers everything from selecting your new-venture team to creating a new-venture board—the senior executives who become the venture’s internal VCs, helping to remove institutional friction and ensuring that every venture can reach escape velocity and thrive.

Focused 100% on execution, the book is filled with methods, assessments, tools, scripts, agendas, and striking visuals illustrating every step. The Unicorn Within provides everything even the most established company needs to create high-growth new ventures that deliver compelling new products and services—and stay perpetually competitive in the face of relentless change.