Roger L. Martin

Alan G. Lafley

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

How Strategy Really Works

Playing to Win

Most companies today have innovation envy. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative: they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants; but they still get disappointing results. Roger Martin argues that to innovate and win, companies need 'design thinking'.

Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

The Design of Business

A.G. Lafley

Are you just playing—or playing to win? Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies. Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point. A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win. The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are: • What is our winning aspiration? • Where will we play? • How will we win? • What capabilities must we have in place to win? • What management systems are required to support our choices? The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.

How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking

The Opposable Mind

Jennifer Riel

A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex and pressing problems.

A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking

Creating Great Choices

If you could imagine the ultimate guide to the essentials of strategy and management, from one of the world's top business thinkers, what would that look like? It would look like this book. Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"--a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the response was typically to just apply it again--with greater enthusiasm. Martin took a fresh, critical approach to helping. When company leaders came to him with fundamental questions--How do you decide where to play and how to win? What is the key to shaping and changing corporate culture? How can you design a successful, sustainable innovation process?--his first response was to break the spell of the current model with a memo articulating a new way to think about the problem at hand, and a more powerful and effective way to successfully overcome it. Over time, these ideas worked their way into Martin's many Harvard Business Review articles. Now, for the first time, they appear together in A New Way to Think. With his trademark incisive intellect and clarity, Martin covers the entire breadth of the management landscape--illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing, and much more. Reading like a series of one-on-one sessions with one of the world's leading business thinkers, A New Way to Think is an essential primer for any current or aspiring business leader.

Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness

A New Way to Think

American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first 200 years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency, spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentenary in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has grown to a level never seen before. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system, which only works when the average family benefits enough to keep voting for it. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: we have treated the economy as a machine for which the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency is considered an inherently good thing. But it has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with efficiency has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economic outcomes: from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). We must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine, Martin argues, and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we must seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policymakers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.

Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

When More Is Not Better

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin inThe Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin callsintegrative thinking creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, andThe Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Winning Through Integrative Thinking

American capitalism is in dire straits, caught in a perilous pattern of increasing volatility, decreasing investor returns, and ongoing bad behavior by executives. And it’s getting worse. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen two massive value-destroying market meltdowns and a string of ethics breaches, including accounting scandals, options-backdating schemes, and the subprime mortgage debacle. Just what is going on here? Is it the inevitable decline of the American economy? Is it the new normal in a technology-enabled global marketplace? Or is it possible that the very theories we’ve embraced to underpin our capital markets are actually producing these crises? In Fixing the Game, Roger Martin reveals the culprit behind the sorry state of American capitalism: our deep and abiding commitment to the idea that the purpose of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. This theory has led to a massive growth in stock-based compensation for executives and, through this, to a naive and wrongheaded linking of the real market—the business of designing, making, and selling products and services—with the expectations market—the business of trading stocks, options, and complex derivatives. Martin shows how this tight coupling has been engineered and lays out its results: a single-minded focus on the expectations market that will continue driving us from crisis to crisis—unless we act now. Using the National Football League as his primary example, Martin illustrates that it is possible to take a much more thoughtful and effective approach than we now do to the intersection of the real and the expectations markets and to governance in general in the capital markets. Martin shows how we can act to end the destructive cycle, including: • Restructuring executive compensation to focus entirely on the real market, not the expectations market • Rethinking the meaning of board governance and role of board members • Reining in the power of hedge funds and monopoly pension funds Concise, hard-hitting, and entertaining, Fixing the Game advocates seizing American capitalism from the jaws of the expectations market and planting it firmly in the real market—and it presents the steps we must take now to do so.

Bubbles, Crashes, and what Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL

Fixing the Game

"Who really moves things forward in our society and how do they do it? How have they always done it? Strategy guru Roger Martin and Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg make a compelling argument that social entrepreneurs are agents of change who recognize, in our current reality, various kinds of "equilibria"-systems in need of change-and then advance social progress by transforming these systems, ultimately replacing what exists with a new equilibrium. Seen in this light, social entrepreneurship is not a marginal activity, but one that unleashes new value for society by releasing untapped human ambition. The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneurs actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a better future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and stories, and share lessons and tools applicable to everyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context. Getting Beyond Better offers a bold new framework demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world, and offering concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policy-makers, and civil society organizations to generate new value, again and again. "--

how social entrepreneurship works

Getting beyond better

Named one of "10 Must-Read Career and Leadership Books For 2022" by Forbes The ultimate guide to the essentials of strategy and management, from one of the world's top business thinkers. Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"—a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the typical response was just to apply it again—with greater enthusiasm. Martin took a fresh, critical approach to helping. When company leaders came to him with fundamental questions—How do you decide where to play and how to win? What is the key to shaping and changing corporate culture? How can you design a successful, sustainable innovation process?—his first response was to break the spell of the current model with a memo articulating a new way to think about the problem at hand and a more powerful and effective way to successfully overcome it. Over time, these ideas worked their way into Martin's many Harvard Business Review articles. Now, for the first time, they appear together in A New Way to Think. With his trademark incisive intellect and clarity, Martin covers the entire breadth of the management landscape—illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing, and much more. Reading like a series of one-on-one sessions with one of the world's leading business thinkers, A New Way to Think is an essential guide for any current or aspiring business leader.

Mihnea C. Moldoveanu

What constitutes successful thinking in business? What are the techniques used by some of the top minds in the business world to solve problems and create value? In Diaminds, Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin, creators of the Integrative Thinking curriculum at the Rotman School of Management, draw upon numerous case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to present a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations. The 'diamind' (or dialogical mind) is characterized by a number of qualities: the ability to simultaneously hold opposing plans, models, and courses of action in mind while retaining the ability to act (bi-stability), logical depth and informational breadth in one's thinking processes (meliorism), the ability to choose among various representations of the world, the self, and others (choicefulness), and the capacity to think about how to analyse and solve a problem while at the same time thinking about the problem itself (polyphony). The authors discuss these concepts in detail, and provide examples and exercises throughout to encourage readers to examine and re-engineer their own thought patterns to develop these qualities and cultivate their own 'diaminds'.

Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers

Diaminds

"Canadians have achieved an enviable balance of economic prosperity and civic harmony, but as emerging countries like China, India, and Brazil take their place alongside developed economies, we cannot be complacent. Our high paying jobs, world-class learning and research institutes, excellent health care, and social safety nets exist only to the extent that we are innovative and competitive globally.

Canada: What It Is, What It Can Be provides an incisive examination of this country's increasing prosperity gap - the difference in value between what we do create and what we could create if we performed at our full potential. As Roger Martin and James Milway demonstrate, although we are proud of our trading prowess, we do not participate as aggressively in world markets with innovative products and services as we could. While we want to take risks to achieve success, our business strategies and economic policies need to set the bar higher to achieve the success we want for Canada.

Written in an accessible style that helps general readers understand complex economic concepts, Canada: What It Is, What It Can Be exposes the myths currently guiding our public policy, and provides ground-breaking new approaches for realizing our full prosperity potential."--Pub. desc.

what it is, what it can be

Canada

Sally Osberg

Who drives transformation in society? How do they do it? In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders--call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers--develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place. The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneuars actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context. Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.

How Social Entrepreneurship Works

Getting Beyond Better

Tim Brown

Harvard Business Review

John P. Kotter

Darrell K. Rigby

Lead change amid constant turbulence and disruption. Get more of the ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you successfully transform your organization. With insights from leading experts including John Kotter, Tim Brown, and Roger Martin, this book will inspire you to: Master the eight accelerators of strategic change Turn your culture into a catalyst for transformation Use your network ties to win over resisters Apply design thinking to secure buy-in Scale agile practices across your organization Get reorgs right Avoid pursuing the wrong changes This collection of articles includes "What Everyone Gets Wrong About Change Management," by N. Anand and Jean-Louis Barsoux; "Cultural Change That Sticks," by Jon R. Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley; "Culture Is Not the Culprit," by Jay W. Lorsch and Emily McTague; "The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents," by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro; "Design for Action," by Tim Brown and Roger L. Martin; "Agile at Scale," by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble; "The Merger Dividend," by Ron Ashkenas, Suzanne Francis, and Rick Heinick; "Getting Reorgs Right," by Stephen Heidari-Robinson and Suzanne Heywood; and "Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than You Think," by Joseph B. Fuller, Judith K. Wallenstein, Manjari Raman, and Alice de Chalendar. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change Management, Vol. 2 (with bonus article "Accelerate!" by John P. Kotter)

The MBA is probably the hottest ticket among the current university graduate degree offerings--every year, more than 120,000 students enroll in MBA programs in the United States, and the estimates in Europe do not lag far behind. In addition, job prospects have never looked better for business school graduates; corporations are hiring more business school graduates every year, and compensating them more handsomely. The Future of the MBA provides a sorely needed detailed and systematic review of the major contemporary debates on management education. At the same time, it makes a striking new proposal that will certainly have an impact in business schools: that managers need to develop a series of qualitative tacit skills which could be appropriately developed by integrative curricula brought from different disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, and other social sciences. Moldoveanu and Martin, both involved in the greatly respected integrative business education program at the Rotheman School of Management, provide a guide on how to design a reliable integrated program for management students. One of the main assets of the book is that it relies not just on speculative thinking, but on real life experience, and that it also includes case studies that will appeal to practicing managers. As an authoritative reference on MBA education, it will appeal to faculty and staff of business schools, as well as students in related fields like education and public policy.

Designing the Thinker of the Future

The Future of the MBA

Clayton M. Christensen

Gary Hamel

Angela L. Duckworth

Build resilience in your company to weather the greatest crises. If you read nothing else on organizational resilience, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company prepare for and overcome disruption, social upheaval, and disaster. This book will inspire you to: Reposition your core business while launching a separate, disruptive business Build the ability to continually anticipate and adjust to emerging trends Prepare for the business implications of climate change Learn about the risks of hyperefficient businesses Develop organizational grit Rebound from a recession faster than your competitors Lead your company through any kind of crisis This collection of articles includes "How Resilience Works" by Diane Coutu; "The Quest for Resilience" by Gary Hamel and Liisa Valikangas; "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave" by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen; "Organizational Grit" by Thomas H. Lee and Angela L. Duckworth; "Leading in Times of Trauma" by Jane E. Dutton, Peter J. Frost, Monica C. Worline, Jacoba M. Lilius, and Jason M. Kanov; "Learning from the Future" by J. Peter Scoblic; "Leading a New Era of Climate Action" by Andrew Winston; "The High Price of Efficiency" by Roger L. Martin; "Reigniting Growth" by Chris Zook and James Allen; "Global Supply Chains in a Post-Pandemic World" by Willy C. Shih; and "Roaring Out of Recession" by Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Organizational Resilience (with bonus article "Organizational Grit" by Thomas H. Lee and Angela L. Duckworth)

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs. Insightful and instructive, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game—changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo. To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another—from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies. Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage. Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

Design of Business

Michael E. Porter

Robert S. Kaplan

Daniel Kahneman

A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Michael E. Porter to Daniel Kahneman and company examples from P&G to Adobe, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations to your fingertips. This book will inspire you to: Reconsider what keeps your customers coming back Create visualizations that send a clear message Assess how quickly disruptive change is coming to your industry Boost engagement by giving your employees the freedom to break the rules Understand what blockchain is and how it will affect your industry Get your product in customers' hands faster by accelerating your research and development phase This collection of articles includes "Customer Loyalty Is Overrated," by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin; "Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Decision Making," by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser; "Visualizations That Really Work," by Scott Berinato; "Right Tech, Wrong Time," by Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor; "How to Pay for Health Care," by Michael E. Porter and Robert S. Kaplan; "The Performance Management Revolution," by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis; "Let Your Workers Rebel," by Francesca Gino; "Why Diversity Programs Fail," by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev; "What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class," by Joan C. Williams; "The Truth About Blockchain," by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani; and "The Edison of Medicine," by Steven Prokesch.

Roger L. Martin

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