Thinkers & Ideas

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...

Peter J. Williamson is Professor of International Management at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and Fellow of Jesus College. He is the coauthor of a new book, Ecosystem Edge, which focuses on how to start and manage ecosystems. In this discussion with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses insights from the book, including ecosystem strategy and inn...

Alex Osterwalder is an author, entrepreneur, and leading thinker on business strategy and innovation. He is the co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas, a tool for designing and mapping business models. Osterwalder is coauthor of a new book, The Invincible Company , which decodes how some of the world’s leading companies have built superior business models and reinvented...

Earlier this year, Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak rejoined BCG as Chief Economist, Managing Director and Partner based in New York, and head of the Center for Macroeconomics at the BCG Henderson Institute. No one could have imagined how quickly his focus would shift to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special episode of the BHI podcast, Rich Lesser, CEO of BCG, and Philipp discuss frequently asked questio...

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Executive Chairman of LEGO Brand Group, recently had a discussion with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, about LEGO’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and preparing for the more permanent shifts in the post-COVID era. Knudstorp discussed changes that are emerging in customer behavior, such as a significant increase in online sales channels, and LEGO’s eff...

Business leaders around the globe are dealing with the unprecedented challenges that the COVID-19 outbreak has brought to companies, economies, and societies.  Marco Alverà, Chief Executive Officer of Snam, one of the world's leading energy infrastructure companies, recently sat down virtually with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, to discuss Snam's response to the crisi...

Karim R. Lakhani is the Professor of Business Administration and the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Fellow at the Harvard Business School, coauthor of the provocative new book, Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World.  Karim discusses how artificial intelligence is changing how we think about competition and company business models with Marti...

Rita Gunther McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker, and a professor at Columbia Business School, where she directs a popular program on Leading Strategic Growth and Change. Her new book, Seeing Around Corners, is a guide to anticipating and capitalizing on disruptive inflection points shaping the marketplace.  Listen to Rita and Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson...

According to research conducted by Knut Haanaes, Dean of the Global Leadership Institute at the World Economic Forum, just 2% of companies consistently outperform their peers on both growth and profitability during good and bad times. What is a 2% company, and how can yours become one? Read more: https://on.bcg.com/2XfSKmL *** About the BCG Henderson Institute The BCG Henderson Institute is the Bo...

In annual reports, the term “ecosystem” occurs 13 times more frequently now than it did a decade ago. But like any buzzword, it tends to be over-applied. What actually is a business ecosystem? How can we use them to create value? Listen to Martin Reeves, Global Director of BHI, and Michael Jacobides, Chair of Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Strategy Professor at the London Business School, d...