Thinkers & Ideas

Ranjay Gulati is an organizational scholar and professor of business at Harvard Business School. His latest book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies shares the stories of companies that pursue what he calls a “deep purpose”. Ranjay studied the actions, cultures, and leadership companies pursuing purpose — where they succeed and where they fall short, to help other leade...

Ron Adner is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Ron previously authored the book The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See that Others Miss . His new book, Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World , is a handbook on how leaders and companies can succeed in an era of ecosystem-based disruption. Adner vie...

Martin Ford is an entrepreneur, futurist, and author of multiple books, including the New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots . He recently published a sequel, Rule of the Robots , in which he claims that the best way to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and society is to see it as a utility analogous to electricity — in fact, “the electricity of intelligence.” I...

Paul Polman was the CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019, the first from outside the company in its century-plus history, and has been described by the Financial Times as “a standout CEO of the past decade.” Today he works to accelerate action by business to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which he helped develop. Andrew Winston is one of the world’s most widely read writers and leading...

Loran Nordgren is Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His research explores the basic psychological processes that guide how we think and act. David Schonthal is Clinical Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Kellogg, as well as Faculty Director of Kellogg’s Zell Fellows Program, a selective venture accelerator program de...

Azeem Azhar is the creator of Exponential View , a global platform for in-depth tech analysis. He is a member of the WEF’s Global Futures Council, a contributor to publications including the Financial Times and the MIT Technology Review, and the host of HBR’s Exponential View podcast. His new book, The Exponential Age , explores how the emergence and exponential advancement of key technologies hav...

Christian Stadler is a Professor of Strategic Management at Warwick Business School and a member of the Editorial Board of the Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Organization. Through his research, Christian primarily examines long-term corporate sustainability — how companies grow, adapt, and beat their competitors through learning, innovating, and diversifying. Together with Julia Hautz,...

Jennifer Moss is an award-winning author, speaker, and radio columnist, reporting on topics related to happiness and workplace well-being. Her articles have appeared in Forbes, the Society of Human Resource Management, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review. Since March 2020, many of us have been operating in crisis mode; quick pivots, learning new policies, and processes on the fly, working from ho...

Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers . Lee was formerly the President of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft and Apple. He chairs the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum. His new book, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future , co-authored with Chen Qiufan, is a literary call-and-response: Qiufan ca...

Sandra Sucher is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and an internationally recognized trust researcher. Her new book, The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It , co-authored with Shalene Gupta, is an exploration of the changing nature of trust. The book leverages interdisciplinary research, alongside key business case studies, to help elaborate on th...

Jeffrey Garten was Dean of the Yale School of Management until 2005, before that Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, and before that a Wall Street investment banker. In his new book, Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy , he tells a detailed narrative of the forces and protagonists that led up to the “Nixon Shock” and the breakdown i...

Rob Lachenauer is the CEO at BanyanGlobal, an organization that advises the owners of the world’s leading family enterprises on strategy and governance. He recently co-authored a book, Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook: How to Build and Sustain a Successful, Enduring Enterprise , that provides an overview of the success factors for family businesses, based on his experience as a fam...

Tsedal Neeley is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Her work focuses on how leaders can scale their organization by developing and implementing global and digital strategies and regularly advises top leaders who are embarking on virtual work and large-scale change that involves global expansion, digital transformation, and becoming more agile. The rapid changes br...

Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author, and speaker who has spent the past 40 years working with many of the top companies, CEOs, and boards. Ram has authored over 30 books since 1998 that have sold over 4 million copies in more than a dozen languages. His recent book, Rethinking Competitive Advantage , explains the source of digital giants’ competitive advantage and describes the...

Philippe Aghion is professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Collège de France and INSEAD, and formerly of Harvard University. He joins BCG Global Chief Economist Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak in conversation to discuss his new book The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations , a broad take on the different variants of capitalism and their shortcomi...

Olivier Sibony is a Professor at HEC Paris and an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School in Oxford University. Together with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein he recently published a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , which focuses on the scatter inherent in decision making. Learn more about how noise differs from bias, how it arises, and how it can be reduced through what the author...

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...