Strategy Wise

Where you are going and how you intend to get there lies at the heart of management and leadership. Strategy is the intellectual and inspirational lifeblood of organizations. Working with the Brightline Initiative, Thinkers50 highlights eight original strategic minds:

1. Weiru Chen

Weiru Chen is an associate professor of strategy at the China Europe International Business School, where he teaches industry and competitive analysis, business model innovation, and strategy. He is the author (with Cho-Hsuan Yu) of Platform Strategy: Business Model Revolution, a Chinese bestseller based on a study of 40 Chinese firms and 20 global companies.

2.  Richard D’Aveni

The Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, D’Aveni is the author of a number of influential books including Hypercompetition (Free Press, 1994), Beating the Commodity Trap (HBR Press, 2009) and Strategic Capitalism (McGraw-Hill, 2012). His forthcoming book, When Titans Rule the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), builds on his HBR article “3-D Printing Will Change the World,” and charts the rise of “panindustrial” manufacturers.

3.  Pankaj Ghemawat

Indian-born Pankaj Ghemawat is the professor of management and strategy and director of the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management at the Stern School of Business. He is also the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Spain. He is the author of World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve it (HBR Press, 2011) and The Laws of Globalization (Cambridge, 2017).

4.  W Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

The authors of the bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy (HBR, 2005), which has sold more than 3.5 million copies, Kim and Mauborgne are professors of strategy at INSEAD and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. Most recently, they are the authors of Blue Ocean Shift (Hachette, 2017).

5.  Rita G McGrath

On the faculty of Columbia Business School since 1993, Rita McGrath is the

author of The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard, 2013). She is also co-author of MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth (HBR Press, 2005), and The Entrepreneurial Mindset (HBR Press, 2000). Her next project, tentatively entitled “Discovery Driven Advantage,” examines how companies can build true proficiency in innovation.

6.  Roger Martin

The former dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Martin is a strategy advisor to CEOs worldwide and the author of ten books, including Thinkers 50 award winners Playing to Win (with AG Lafley, HBR Press, 2013) and Getting Beyond Better (with Sally Osberg, HBR Press, 2015). His new book Creating Great Choices (with Jennifer Riel, HBR Press, 2017) follows up on his 2007 bestseller The Opposable Mind (HBR Press).

7.  Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Yves Pigneur is a Belgian computer scientist and Alex Osterwalder is a Swiss consultant and founder of Strategyzer. They are the authors of Business Model Generation (Wiley, 2010), which has sold more than one million copies in 30 languages. They invented the “Business Model Canvas,” used by companies worldwide. The original book has been followed by Business Model You (Wiley, 2012) and Value Proposition Design (Wiley, 2014).

8.  András Tilcsik

Hungarian-born Tilcsik is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management and a faculty fellow at the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship. In 2015, he and Chris Clearfield won the Bracken Bower Prize from McKinsey and the Financial Times, given to the best business book proposal by scholars under 35. The book, Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, is forthcoming (Penguin, 2018).