Thinkers & Ideas

In Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? , Jared Diamond argues that leaders change the course of history only when two things align: circumstances that give an individual real room to act, and the right person in place to meet that moment. Diamond, professor emeritus of geography at UCLA, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel as well as Coll...

In Sea Change: America’s New Great Game in the Arctic Circle , Rana Foroohar argues that as melting ice turns the Arctic into the frontline of great power competition, America’s shortage of icebreakers and ships exposes a deeper problem: it has lost the industrial capacity that its national security depends on. Foroohar is global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and g...

In AI Native: The Mandate to Transform Your Company , Kai-Fu Lee argues that real competitive advantage from AI does not come from buying access to the most powerful model, but from rebuilding the company itself around AI. Lee is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, the founder and CEO of 01.AI, the former president of Google China, and the bestselling author of AI Superpowers . In his new...

In The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility , Nitin Nohria argues that the CEO’s real work is not making the big decisions personally but building the conditions under which thousands of good decisions get made by everyone else. Nohria is the former dean of Harvard Business School, where he is currently the George F. Baker Professor of Administration, and for nearly 30 years he has run t...

In How Great Ideas Happen: The Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success , George Newman argues that great ideas are not conjured from within but discovered outside of us, already present in the world, and that finding them is a methodical search anyone can run rather than a flash of genius reserved for a gifted few. Newman is a cognitive scientist and psychologist, and an associate professor of or...

In Manage the Machine: How to Harness Human-AI Collaboration at Work , Paula Goldman argues that AI has crossed over from being a tool to being a partner, and that the companies that win will not be the ones automating the most or the fastest, but the ones that deliberately design around where humans still need to lead. Goldman is the first-ever chief ethical and humane use officer at Salesforce,...

In Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform , Vijay Govindarajan argues that the most powerful innovations are designed from the ground up for emerging markets like rural China or India, and then travel back to disrupt wealthy ones. Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and one of the world’s foremost ex...

In Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Renée Mauborgne argues that lasting growth does not come from winning market share in crowded existing industries, but from creating entirely new market space that no one is competing in yet. Mauborgne is a professor of strategy at INSEAD and co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute....

As uncertainty continues to define the business landscape, we’re revisiting our conversation with economist and complexity scientist Doyne Farmer on why conventional forecasting often falls short in a world shaped by interconnected, dynamic systems. Drawing on decades of research, he explains how complexity science offers a more realistic way to think about prediction, risk, and decision-making—an...

In Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos Into Clarity , Matthew Weaver and Mikey Dickerson argue that organizational crises are not problems to be survived but are rare windows in which rapid, directed transformation becomes possible within days rather than years. Weaver was a founding Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google and later established the Defense Digital Service at...

In The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us , Benjamin Recht argues that the optimization and mathematical rationality we apply to every corner of modern life—from dieting to hiring to strategy—often fails when encountering the messy realities of life. Recht is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. In his new book, he traces how...

In AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own , Verity Harding argues that AI governance is too important to be left to technologists alone—and that the rest of us need to join the conversation to shape this technology’s future. Harding is the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and the founder of Format...

In Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great , Eric Ries argues that mission-driven companies face an invisible pressure that pushes them toward short-termism and conformity, no matter the intentions of their stakeholders. Ries is the best-selling author of The Lean Startup , founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and advisor to startups around the globe. In his...

In Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better , David Epstein argues that constraints—not freedom—are what drive creativity, clarity, and focus. Epstein is a number one New York Times –best-selling author, known for Range and The Sports Gene . In his new book, he draws on psychology, economics, and case studies from NASA to Pixar to Dr. Seuss to show that our brains default to the path of leas...

In Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation , Linda A. Hill argues that innovation fails not because companies lack ideas, but because they struggle to scale those ideas across the enterprise—and that the solution lies not in structure or processes, but in leadership. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, faculty chair of the L...

In Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business , Marcus Buckingham argues that love—not engagement, satisfaction, or motivation—is the only feeling that reliably changes the behavior of employees and customers, and that it can be deliberately designed into business. Buckingham is one of the world’s foremost researchers on human performance. He is a former senior vice preside...

In this special episode, Rich Lesser, BCG’s global chair, and Martin Reeves, former chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, reflect on the shocks and surprises that shaped the first half of the decade and what they reveal about the future. They explore the traits leaders need today: building trust, staying geopolitically aware, and adopting AI in a people-centered way.

In The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations , B. Joseph Pine II argues that an economic shift is underway, in which transformations—not commodities, goods, services, or experiences—will become the highest form of value creation. Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, known for having coined the term “experience economy” in the 1990s. He works as a speaker an...

In The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder , Eswar Prasad argues that we are caught in a destructive feedback loop between economics, domestic politics, and geopolitics. Prasad is a professor of Trade Policy and Economics at Cornell University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In his new book, he explores how globalization, international insti...

In The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies , Mehran Gul examines how innovation works in different countries around the globe—diving deep into the ecosystems that produce great technology companies. Gul is a writer and leading technology thinker, having served as the Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum. His book, w...

In Flourish: The Transformative Power of Creating Community , Daniel Coyle investigates the ecosystems in which humans do their best work—from sports teams, to the boardroom, and our daily lives. Daniel Coyle is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, in which he explores how people and groups grow, perform, and flourish. He combines immersive field reporting with behavioral science to...

In Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate , Dani Rodrik proposes new modes of cooperation and policy experimentation to address our greatest global challenges. Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. He codirects both the Reimagining the Economy Program at Harvard a...

In The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things that Last , Jimmy Wales explains how he turned an impossible idea—creating an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit—into a global institution. Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. In his new book, he distills two decades of lessons from building one of the world’s most trusted collaborative projects. He argues that trust isn’t a soft vi...

In How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage , Ranjay Gulati argues that being bold is something you can learn—not a trait you have to be born with. Gulati, a professor at Harvard Business School, is a leading organizational sociologist and management scholar. In his new book, he explores the science and psychology of courage—showing that bravery is not the absence of fear, but th...

In The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset , Mike Bird shows why land remains the ultimate currency of power. Bird is the Wall Street editor at The Economist , where he leads coverage across the American financial industry and cohosts the magazine’s flagship podcast Money Talks . In his new book, he presents a bold new framework explaining how land exerts influence over the modern...