Thinkers & Ideas

Kenneth Cukier is a New York Times bestselling author on technology and business, a journalist at The Economist, and an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Francis de Véricourt is a Professor of Management Science and the Director of the Center for Decisions, Models and Data at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. Together with Viktor Mayer-S...

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen , an impact investment fund that has partnered to build more than 100 social enterprises that bring basic services like affordable education, health care, clean water, energy, and sanitation to more than 300 million people across Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the United States. In her latest book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Prac...

Dambisa Moyo is an economist and best-selling author who focuses on macroeconomics and global affairs. She currently serves on the boards of Chevron Corporation and the 3M Company. Previously, she was a board member of Barclays, Barrick Gold, and Seagate Technology, and worked at Goldman Sachs and at the World Bank. Her new book, How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World , b...

In the absence of excessive regulation or anti-competitive practices, industries are observed to evolve toward an optimal market structure called the Rule of Three . This entails that a market with three full-line generalist firms that are volume-driven and with numerous successful small specialists that are margin-driven. In their new book, The Global Rule of Three , Can Uslay, Associate Professo...

Charles Goodhart is professor emeritus of monetary economics at the London School of Economics. Charles was a member of the monetary policy committee at the Bank of England between ’97 and 2002 and is a fellow of the British Academy. Manoj Pradhan is the founder of Talking Heads Macro, an independent macro research firm, a former MD in Morgan Stanley’s global macro team, and previously an academic...

Kevin Roose is an award-winning technology columnist for The New York Times, and the New York Times bestselling author of three books: Futureproof , Young Money , and The Unlikely Disciple . He writes and speaks regularly on many topics, including automation and A.I., social media, disinformation and cybersecurity, and digital wellness. His most recent book, Futureproof , focuses on the question,...

Raphael Amit, Professor of Management at the Wharton School, and Christoph Zott , Professor of Entrepreneurship at IESE Business School, have co-published extensively on all aspects of business model innovation strategy. Their new book, Business Model Innovation Strategy: Transformational Concepts and Tools for Entrepreneurial Leaders , is a guide on business model design for leaders. In a convers...

Noreena Hertz is an English academic, economist, and author of four books. Having spent 10 years at the University of Cambridge, in 2014 she moved to University College London where she is an Honorary Professor at the Institute for Global Prosperity. Her latest book The Lonely Century: How to Restore Human Connection in a World that’s Pulling Apart focuses on how loneliness has become a defining c...

Spoiler Alert We preface this podcast with a ‘spoiler alert’ as this novel is different from the more formal economics works we usually discuss on this podcast, and we wish to give the listener the chance to opt-out and read the book first if they wish. We greatly enjoyed the read and even if we don’t see eye to eye on much of the economics in this novel, we found the indulgence of literature a va...

Mauro F. Guillén is Professor of International Management at the Wharton School. He served as Director of the Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies between 2007 and 2019. His new book, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything , outlines eight interlocking trends that together will reshape society as we know it by 2030. In a conversatio...

Judy Samuelson is executive director of the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program . She previously worked in legislative affairs in California, banking in New York’s garment center, and ran the Ford Foundation’s office of program-related investments. In her new book, The Six New Rules of Business: Creating Real Value in a Changing World , she explores how societal shifts in recent decades h...

Luciano Pietronero is an Italian statistical physics and full professor at the department of physics at University of Rome Sapienza. He was the founder and director of the Institute of Complex Systems of CNR from 2004 to 2014. Luciano’s research activities have been on fundamental and applied problems in the areas of condensed matter theory, statistical physics, and complex systems. His most recen...

There’s increasing dynamism and stress in business environments and we have “firestorms” ranging everywhere that could consume incumbent businesses at any time. According to Ian C. Woodward, V. “Paddy” Padmanabhan, Sameer Hasija, and Ram Charan, co-authors of The Phoenix Encounter Method , in order to avoid being disrupted, leaders need to go through “phoenix encounters”, in which they contemplate...

Daniel Susskind is a Fellow in Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and the author of A World Without Work (2020) and The Future of the Professions (2015). Previously he worked in the British Government as a policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, as a policy analyst in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and as a senior policy adviser in the Cabinet Office. In A World Without Wor...

John Kay is one of Britain’s leading economists, and has been a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford since 1970. His work is centered on the relationships between economics, finance, and business. Today his main focus is on writing and he is renowned for his ability to express complex ideas clearly and succinctly. He is the author of many books, including The Truth about Markets (2003) and Obliquit...

Georg Kell is the founding Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact , the world’s largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative and Chairman of Arabesque Partners. Kell, along with Herman Bril and Andreas Rasche, are the co-editors of Sustainable Investing: A path to a new horizon , a unique combination of perspectives from academics and practitioners on how corporate sustai...

Loizos Heracleous is Professor of Strategy and Organisation at the Warwick Business School, and Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College and Saïd Business School. In his new book, Janus Strategy , he argues that organizations can accomplish strategies that seek to reach competing goals. Traditional strategy wisdom suggests that there are two generic strategies — differentiation and cost leaders...

Marc Levinson is an independent economist and historian. He is the author of The Box (2006) and several other books, a former finance and economics editor of The Economist , a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former sell-side analyst. His work has focused on trade, finance, globalization, and business. In his new book, Outside the Box , he argues that a fourth phase...

Rebecca Henderson is an economist, a professor at Harvard Business School, a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of both the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an expert on innovation and organizational change, a board member of Idexx Laboratories and of CERES. In her new book, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire , s...

Michael Kearns is Professor and the National Center Chair in the Computer and Information Science department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has secondary appointments in Economics and the Wharton School. He has published widely in machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic game theory, and quantitative finance. His latest book, The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Sociall...

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a Harvard Business Press author and an expert on innovation and problem-solving. His first book, “Innovation as Usual”, coauthored with Paddy Miller, was translated into five languages and got Thomas recognized as a “Top 20 International Thinker” by HR Magazine. His new book, What’s Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve focuses o...

Margaret Heffernan is a Texas-born, Cambridge educated author, former media CEO, award-winning journalist, and BBC documentary maker whose TED Talks have been viewed more than twelve million times. Her six previous books include Willful Blindness, which was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times. In this podcast with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG H...

Roger L. Martin is Professor Emeritus of Strategic Management, at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, where he served as Dean (1998–2013) and as Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute (2013–2019). In 2017 Thinkers50 named him the world's #1 management thinker. In this podcast with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses insights from his new b...

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a Professor of economics and Director of Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on economic development, global macroeconomics, and the fight against poverty. In this discussion with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses insights from his new book, The Ages of Globalizat...

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini's forthcoming book, Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them , highlights bureaucracy's social, economic and strategic shortcomings and proposes 'humanocracy' as an alternative management model. In this discussion with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Gary Hamel discusses why companies need to tackle bureaucracy's...