Roger Martin
The truth about culture is that the only way you can change it is by changing the way individuals work with one another. If you can change that, then you will find the culture has changed.
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior
Roger Martin
If you base your strategy on analyzing the past, then you are implicitly making the assumption that the future will be identical to the past. Because it’s based on rigorous analysis—and you’ve been taught in business school that rigorous analysis is correct—then you will not be ready for the future to end up looking different than the past, and you’re more likely to stick with … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Strategy
Roger L. Martin, Peter F. Drucker
Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business. What they teach are finance, what they teach is marketing, they teach us HR. As the greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, “There are no marketing problems, there are no finance problems, there are no accounting problems, there are only business problems.” These are problems that sloppily span across a bunch of … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Peter F. Drucker, Roger L. Martin | Source: YouTube | Subjects: Management, MBA Related
Roger L. Martin
A great leader’s first reaction is, hmm, say more. Tell me more. … Because it has this super big knock-on effect. One, it causes your subordinates to all think that if you’ve got an interesting thought, I’m open to hearing it. I’m not going to just shut that down because it disagrees with me. Everybody is more inclined to think about things and think about … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: YouTube | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior
Roger L. Martin
We are not taught how to take advantage of a diverse thought—diverse in the sense that your thought conflicts with mine—rather than saying, “I have an idea. Yours is different than mine. I must make sure mine triumphs,” which is generally what we’re taught to do, to advocate for our point of view. We’re not going to get where we need to be on diversity … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior
Social Entrepreneurship by the Billions
An audacious effort to provide digital ID numbers throughout India illustrates the potential for large-scale change.
Content: Article | Authors: Jennifer Riel, Roger L. Martin, Sally R. Osberg | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)
The 3 Simple Rules of Managing Top Talent
During my 15 years of managing talent as dean of the Rotman School of Management, and previously as cohead of Monitor, I have managed some of the best and brightest in professorial talent and the strategy consulting industry worldwide. Over this combined quarter-century of experience, I developed three rules for managing top-end talent.
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Roger L. Martin
Even experts can be blind to important features of their subjects. I have done a lot of work on country competitiveness, but if anybody had asked me in 2000 to name the top 100 conditions that underpin a thriving economy, I wouldn’t have mentioned “a well-functioning land registry system.” Then I read [Hernando] de Soto’s compelling case that the ability to get clear title to … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Expertise, Knowledge
Roger L. Martin
Do a little test of your strategy before committing to it. Ask: Is the opposite stupid on its face? Have most of my competitors made the same choice as me? If the answers are “yes,” you have more work to do to have a smart strategy rather than just a non-stupid one.
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Roger L. Martin
Anyone taking the time to delve into the literature of strategy quickly realizes that there are two fiercely opposed camps.
In the red corner we have the “positioning school” (TPS) and in the white we have the “resource-based view of the firm” (RBV). Michael Porter is credited with (or more often accused of) creating TPS in 1980—positing that a firm should think about positioning itself in … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Roger Martin
Strategy is not the inevitable outcome of a process of analysis: it is a choice of where a firm wants to play and how it will win there going forward. Yes, a working knowledge of the industry and its likely evolution, the customers and their likely preferences, the firm itself and its potential capabilities and cost structure, and its competitors and their likely responses and … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Strategy Is About Both Resources and Positioning
Anyone taking the time to delve into the literature of strategy quickly realizes that there are two fiercely opposed camps.
In the red corner we have the “positioning school” (TPS) and in the white we have the “resource-based view of the firm” (RBV). Michael Porter is credited with (or more often accused of) creating TPS in 1980—positing that a firm should think about positioning itself in … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
There Are Still Only Two Ways to Compete
Back in the early 1960s, the great Boston Consulting Group founder and strategy theorist Bruce Henderson asserted that there was only one way to successfully compete: gain a relative market share advantage over all competitors so as to have lower costs than all of them. The payoff is that it puts the firm in a position to drive those relative costs even lower as competition … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Roger Martin
An economist falls apart and turns into a blubbing puddle on the floor if you take away the concept of trade-offs because they all started in the same place: the societal trade-off between guns and butter. Trade-offs are a sacred article of faith for economists. You simply can’t be an economist if you don’t consider trade-offs to be a central feature of your worldview.
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Economics
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G’s sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009). The book shows leaders in any type of organization … [ Read more ]
Content: Book | Authors: A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin | Subject: Strategy
How to Win the Argument with Milton Friedman
In 1970, in his famous essay, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman railed against any corporate attempt to promote “desirable social ends” which he argued were “highly subversive to the capitalist system.”
Ever since, folks have argued that Friedman is wrong to make the trade-off between shareholders and the rest of society so wholly in favor of shareholders and that … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)
Strategy in a World of Constant Change
Advantage is neither transitory nor immortal. Hence, strategy is not an either-or exercise about seeking flexibility OR sustainability. It is about both: seeking sustainable competitive advantage in a world full of far-reaching and tumultuous change.
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Strategy
Roger Martin
Real competitive advantage is enormously long-lived. …To be sure, first mover advantages can vaporize quickly, but not all first mover advantages are backed by a real competitive advantage. So if I hear the demise of MySpace cited once more as evidence that competitive advantage has become more transient, I will puke. All it proves is the basic rule of business: that which can be … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Competition, Strategy
A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin
In our view, leaders would do well to take a more systematic approach to developing their decision-making capabilities. The place to start is… with intellectual integrity. In common usage, the word integrity means honorable or virtuous behavior. For our purposes, though, we draw a distinction between exhibiting honorable behavior (moral integrity) and exhibiting discipline, clarity, and consistency so that all of one’s decisions fit together … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Integrity, Thought
The Wrong Incentive: Executives Taking Stock Will Behave Like Athletes Placing Bets
In football, there is a rigid separation of the real market — the games played on Sundays — from the expectations market, or the betting that takes place prior to the game. No participant in the real market is permitted to participate in any way in the expectations market. If they do, they risk a lifetime ban for even one infraction. There is an even … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Roger L. Martin | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Economics, Finance