Thinkers & Ideas

In How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be , Cass Sunstein reveals why some individuals become celebrities—and others don’t. Sunstein has long been at the forefront of behavioral economics. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Af...

In The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions , Michael Norton explores how the little things we do can create big impact. Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he also leads the unit for negotiation, organization, and markets. A well known and respected researcher on behavioral economi...

In Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times , Rebecca Homkes guides leaders on how to turn uncertainty into opportunity. Homkes teaches business strategy at the London Business School, is on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education, and consults major companies on strategy. She has developed a framework for leading through uncertainty based on three principles:...

At the BCG Henderson Institute, we aim to bring forward-looking leaders the ideas and inspirations that will shape their next game. To honor this mission—and celebrate the 100th episode of our Thinkers & Ideas podcast—we welcomed three leading futurists to discuss the evolution of business and society. Rita McGrath is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and has been ranked a...

In Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There , Cass Sunstein , together with his co-author Tali Sharot, discusses the importance of reevaluating the familiar to discover new insights. Sunstein has long been at the forefront of behavioral economics. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and served as the administrator of the White House Office of Informa...

In Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality , Venki Ramakrishnan explores the current research on and prospects for human longevity. Ramakrishnan leads a group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. For his research on the structure and function of ribosomes, he won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From 2015 to 2020, he served as president of...

In  Making Sense of Chaos: A better economics for a better world ,  J. Doyne Farmer  challenges traditional economic models, which rely on simplistic assumptions and fail to provide accurate predictions. Farmer, a complex systems scientist at the University of Oxford and the Santa Fe Institute, argues that with technological advances in data science and computing, we are now able to...

In Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI , Ethan Mollick explains how to engage with AI as a co-worker, a co-teacher, and a coach. Mollick is a professor of management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. In his new book, he discusses the profound impacts AI will have on business and education, usin...

In The Intelligence of Intuition , Gerd Gigerenzer challenges a commonly held view of intuition—namely, that it is somehow inferior to logical rationality. Gigerenzer is director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam , director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development , and an expert on human decisio...

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...