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Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since September 1, 1998. He is an advisor on strategy to the CEO’s of several major global corporations. He writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek.com’s Innovation and Design Channel. He is also a regular contributor to Washington Post’s On Leadership blog and to Financial Times’ Judgment Call column. He has published several books, including: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009), The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (2007), The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-and The Rest Of Us-Can Harness The Power Of True Partnership (2002), and The Future of the MBA: Designing the Thinker of the Future, (with Mihnea Moldoveanu, 2008) and Dia-Minds (with Moldoveanu, forthcoming, 2010).

In 2009, Roger Martin was named one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world by The Times of London.

In 2007 he was named a Business Week ‘B-School All-Star’ for being one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world.

He serves on the Boards of Thomson Reuters Corporation and Research in Motion and is a trustee of The Hospital for Sick Children.

He received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

Presentations Include:

The Design of Business
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).

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.

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking
Based on his 2007 book The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin’s talk unlocks the secrets of how highly successful leaders think and describes how you can build your Integrative Thinking skills.   The book draws on in-depth interviews of over 50 highly successful leaders from the corporate, non-profit and entertainment sectors and the talk include video snippets from a half dozen of these leaders, including AG Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble; Isadore Sharp, founder and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels; and Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman and former CEO of Infosys Technologies.  The message is a practical, action-oriented approach to thinking more like the most successful leaders of our time.  Leading corporations including P&G have adopted Integrative Thinking into their senior level management training.

Design Thinking
Design Thinking balances analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, enabling an organization to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. A design-thinking organization is capable of effectively advancing knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm, gaining a cost advantage over its competitors along the way.  And with that cost advantage, it can redirect its design thinking capacity to solve the next important mystery and advance still further ahead of its competitors. In this way, the design-thinking organization is capable of achieving lasting and regenerating competitive advantage.

Incentives, Executive Compensation and Governance
Incentives, Executive Compensation and Governance are three important topics that are linked to one another. The corporations that are such a big part of the productivity and prosperity equation require governance that ensures that they are using their financial, human and physical assets constructively. A key facet of the governance of modern corporations is the compensation of executives, especially of the CEO, for which the board of directors has sole authority. Executive compensation, in turn is a function of how we think about incentives that can be used to shape and encourage executive behavior and action.
 
 

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