Thinkers & Ideas

In Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions , Akshat Rathi tells the stories of people around the world who are building impactful solutions to tackle climate change. Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News, focusing on climate and energy. He also hosts the weekly Zero podcast , in which he talks to the people leading the fight for a zero-emissions future. In his new boo...

In Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto , Kohei Saito explores the relationship between capitalism and the climate crisis. He argues, controversially, that to have any chance of achieving true sustainability, we must move to a system which deemphasizes growth, adopts different metrics of progress, expands the commons, and places value on goods and services which are not currently considered as part o...

In Higher Ground: How Businesses Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World , Alison Taylor explores how companies can navigate the complexity of modern business ethics. Taylor, a clinical associate professor at NYU Stern, has spent decades advising large multinational companies on risk, corruption, sustainability, and organizational culture. In her new book, she combines her experience with vivi...

In The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder , Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao share insights on friction—the forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or even impossible to get things done in organizations. Sutton is an expert on organizational psychology at Stanford University and a best-selling author. His latest book is a culmination...

In  Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World , Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence, along with their coauthors, Gordon Brown and Reid Lidow, consider how we’ve arrived at this state of constant instability and insecurity—and suggest concrete ways to break the cycle. Mohamed El-Erian , president of Queens’ College Cambridge University, was previously the chair of President Obama’s Global D...

In The Worlds I See , Dr. Fei-Fei Li provides a personal and deeply insightful depiction of two convergent journeys. One describes her own life and career; Li immigrated to the U.S. from China at age 15, and within a few years had launched into research in computer vision and AI. The other is a history of AI, which has involved many breakthroughs over the past 70 years, culminating in a technology...

In his new book  The Secret of Culture Change: How To Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization ,  Jay Bryan Barney discusses why changing company culture is sometimes necessary but always challenging—and how the power of stories can help leaders mobilize their employees around a new strategy. Jay Barney, a professor of strategic management and the Pierre Lassonde Chair of Social En...

In The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results , Andrew McAfee describes how a new approach to corporate culture based on science, ownership, speed, and openness, is driving value creation in the 21st century. McAfee is an expert on how technological progress changes the world, being named to both the Thinkers50 list of top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of p...

In Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership ,  Dr. Kirstin Ferguson provides a practical guide to balancing the rational and emotional components of leadership. Ferguson is an expert on leadership, an experienced leader in the private and public sectors, and a longtime advocate of gender equity. In her new book, she identifies the key attributes of a “head and heart” leader, providing people...

In How to Work with (Almost) Anyone , Michael Bungay Stanier outlines how to set up working relationships for the best chance of success—by following a process of thorough preparation, a keystone conversation, and regular maintenance. Bungay Stanier, founder of coaching firm Box of Crayons, is a world-renowned thought leader on coaching and author of the best-selling coaching book, The Coaching Ha...

In his new book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens , Rajiv Shah , President of the Rockefeller Foundation recounts his experiences and lessons learned over decades of effecting large-scale social change. He shares how addressing humanity’s thorniest challenges requires a big bets mindset – pushing to solve, rather than merely improve, problems; and going for “big enough”, rather than...

In his new book,   Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work ,   Uri Gneezy explains why leaders often create incentives that are misaligned with their organization’s goals. Gneezy, the Epstein/Atkinson Chair in Management Leadership at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management, is one of the world’s leading experts in behavioral economics, and his insights have become a staple in courses around th...

In his new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and The Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma , Mustafa Suleyman discusses the new technologies that will transform society—chief among them AI and synthetic biology. Suleyman is a renowned thought leader on this topic, having co-founded Inflection AI and DeepMind, and having served as VP of AI product management and AI policy at Google. Toget...

In her forthcoming book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well , Amy Edmondson offers a new framework to think about, discuss, and practice failure wisely, using human fallibility as a tool for making ourselves and our organizations smarter. Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and the author of seven books, including The Fe...

In The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society ,  Mauro Guillén argues that the traditional, sequential model of life—childhood, education, career, and retirement—is being rendered obsolete. Guillén, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world’s foremost experts on global megatrends. In his most recent book, he focus...

In his new book Power and Progress , Simon Johnson , along with his co-author Daron Acemoglu, challenges the techno-optimistic narrative that technological progress will automatically lead to shared prosperity. Johnson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, takes us through a millennium of technological progress to show how the gains from advancements such as the agricultural and earl...

In his new book, LOOK: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World , Christian Madsbjerg explores the importance of observational skills. Drawing on various fields—science, philosophy, and the arts—as well as his personal experiences, Madsbjerg offers tools and insights to help us better pay attention and extract insights. Madsbjerg was co-founder and senior partner of consulting firm, ReD Associat...

In his latest book, Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way , Jonah Berger breaks down the science of language. The right words can influence actions and happiness, and reveal insights about those who say or write them. Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School, is an expert on change, social influence, and word-of-mouth communication. Together with Martin Reeves, Chairman...

In her new book The Case for Good Jobs , Zeynep Ton explains why creating good jobs, particularly for frontline workers, will help companies thrive. Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president and co-founder of the Good Jobs Institute, has long been an advocate of investing in employees. Traditional bad jobs systems—characterized by low pay, high turnover, and poor operati...

In this special episode of the Thinkers & Ideas podcast, we invited Sir Partha Dasgupta and Simon Levin – co-authors of the forthcoming report " Economic Factors Underlying Biodiversity Loss " – and Georg Kell to discuss a topic often overlooked in sustainability discussions: biodiversity. They discuss gaps in our current thinking, a potential path forward, how to measure our progress along it...

Bent Flyvbjerg  has a sobering statistic to share: 99.5% of major projects fail to deliver their targeted results on time and on budget. His new book  How Big Things Get Done , coauthored with  Dan Gardner , explores this phenomenon—from infrastructure projects to major sporting events to corporate transformations. Flyvbjerg, the first BT Professor of Major Programme Management at O...

In a new book with longtime collaborator W. Chan Kim, Beyond Disruption , Renée Mauborgne describes an alternative path to pursue innovation and growth. Non-disruptive creation taps into a new market outside or beyond the boundaries of existing industries, to not only drive economic growth but also have a positive impact on society by avoiding the negative aspects of disruption, like job displacem...

A “microstress,” as defined by Rob Cross and Karen Dillon in their new book of the same name, is a small amount pressure from our everyday interactions that is hardly perceived in the moment. But when many microstesses pile up, they become debilitating. Cross, the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., has studied the underlying networks of effective...

In her book Think Bigger: How to Innovate , Sheena Iyengar dispels the notion that the best way of coming up with a good idea is to have a group brainstorm or to rely on the unpredictable intuitions of special gifted individuals. Iyengar is the S. T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and an expert on decision-making and choice. Drawing on advances in brain science, she argues t...

In his new book,  The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism ,  Financial Times ’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf explores the causes of and solutions to today’s global democratic recession. Wolf, who in 2000 was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) “for services to financial journalism,” is the author of several earlier books on global economics. Together with Martin Reeve...