Thinker of the Month
Rosabeth Ross Kanter
October 2019 Thinker of the Month
Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School. She is also the co-founder and former director of the Advanced Leadership Initiative, which was created to enhance and leverage the skills of already accomplished leaders for maximum impact on significant social problems. Moss Kanter is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review.
Megan Reitz
September 2019 Thinker of the Month
Megan Reitz is Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge where she speaks, researches, consults and supervises on the intersection of leadership, change, dialogue and mindfulness. She has presented her research to audiences throughout the world and is the author of Dialogue in Organizations and Mind Time. Her new book, with Financial Times Publishing, is called Speak Up.
Michael Jacobides
July 2019 Thinker of the Month
Michael G Jacobides holds the Sir Donald Gordon chair of entrepreneurship and innovation at London Business School, where he is professor of strategy. He is an academic advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, a visiting scholar at the New York Fed, and a visiting fellow at Cambridge.
Karolin Frankenberger
May 2019 Thinker of the Month
Karolin Frankenberger is the academic director of the Executive MBA in the Executive School of Management, Technology and Law at the University of St. Gallen as well as director of the Institute of Management and Strategy in the School of Management at the University of St. Gallen.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
March 2019 Thinker of the Month
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is the global champion of project management. He argues that projects are the lingua franca of the business and personal worlds from the C-suite to managing your career or relationships.
Marshall Van Alstyne
February 2019 Thinker of the Month
Marshall Van Alstyne is coauthor of the international bestseller Platform Revolution. His research has received over 10,000 Google Scholar citations and won half a dozen academic awards.
Tiffani Bova
December 2018 Thinker of the Month
Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce and author of Growth I Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business (Portfolio).
Richard D’Aveni
October 2018 Thinker of the Month
Richard D’Aveni, professor of strategic management at the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth University, created the concept of hyper-competition. Most recently his work has looked at commoditization and, in his 2012 book Strategic Capitalism, the competitive clash of nations. He was awarded the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2017.
Alison Reynolds & David Lewis
September 2018 Thinker of the Month
Alison Reynolds is a member of faculty at Ashridge Business School where she works with executive groups in the field of leadership, strategy execution and organization development. David Lewis is the director of London Business School’s flagship senior executive programme, and of the executing strategy for results programme. They are the co-authors of the forthcoming book, The Qi Effect.
Anders Indset
July / August 2018 Thinker of the Month
Norwegian-born occasional tech-investor based in Frankfurt, Germany and a visiting lecturer at leading international business schools, founding partner of Frankfurt International Alliance (FIA) and an advisory board member of German Tech Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC) as well as an advisor to CEOs and politicians. He is author of Wild Knowledge: Outthink the Revolution (LID, 2017).
Kriti Jain
June 2018 Thinker of the Month
An assistant professor at IE Business School, Jain’s research focuses on judgment and decision making. She is particularly interested in developing an understanding on how individuals and groups make assessments about future uncertainty and how personality traits, emotions, and decision frames influence judgments. She also maintains interest in areas of negotiation and conflict management.
Whitney Johnson
May 2018 Thinker of the Month
Former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst Whitney Johnson is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption; specifically, a framework which she codifies in the critically acclaimed book Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and expands on in the upcoming book Build an “A” Team: Play To Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (2018).
Tendayi Viki
April 2018 Thinker of the Month
Tendayi Viki is an award winning author and corporate innovation expert. He holds a PhD in Psychology and an MBA. Through his consulting firm Benneli Jacobs, Tendayi works with companies to develop their internal ecosystems so they can innovate for the future while managing their core business.
Maja Korica
March 2018 Thinker of the Month
Croatian born Korica is an associate professor of management and organization at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Her research focuses on understanding complex and rarely seen organizational settings, particularly at the top of organizational hierarchies, and where public interest is involved.
Margarita Mayo
February 2018 Thinker of the Month
Professor of leadership at IE Business School in Madrid and a visiting professor at ESMT – the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin. Her new book, Yours Truly: Staying Authentic in Leadership and Life, is out this month.
Jeanne Liedtka
January 2018 Thinker of the Month
Jeanne Liedtka is the UTC professor of business at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. Formerly the associate dean of the MBA at Darden, and chief learning officer for United Technologies, Jeanne’s research focuses on the intersection of innovation and strategy, in particular the integration of design thinking into organizational problem solving processes.
2017 & 2016
Tom Peters
October, November & December 2017 Thinker of the Month
Tom Peters has been credited with inventing the modern management guru industry. He is chairman of the Tom Peters Company, and has several best-selling business books under his name.
Anindya Ghose
September 2017 Thinker of the Month
Anindya Ghose is an Indian-born American academic, and the Heinz Riehl chair professor of business at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He directs the Masters of Business Analytics programme at NYU Stern.
Mark Greeven
August 2017 Thinker of the Month
Mark Greeven (PhD, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University) is associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship in Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), director for the MBA programme Global Entrepreneurship, research fellow at the China’s National Institute for Innovation Management, the China-Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and Center for Global R&D and Innovation (GLORAD). Before moving to China, he worked as faculty at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.
Celebrating Women Thinkers
July 2017 Thinkers of the Month
Zhang Ruimin
May & June 2017 Thinker of the Month
Zhang Ruimin is chairman and CEO of Haier Group. In 1984, Zhang Ruimin became director of the Qingdao Refrigerator Factory, the predecessor of Haier. Over more than 30 years, he has turned a small collectively-owned factory with a 1.47m Yuan loss into a global enterprise with global turnover of 188.7b Yuan (2015). Haier now tops the Global Major Appliance Brand rankings with the highest retail volume – and has done so for seven consecutive years. Haier is also included in the World Brand Top 100 and was ranked number one in the global white goods industry. Among many firsts, Zhang Ruimin was the first Chinese entrepreneur to give a speech at Harvard.
Mark Esposito
April 2017 Thinker of the Month
Professor Mark Esposito teaches business, government and society, and economic strategy and competitiveness at Harvard University’s Division of Continuing Education. He also serves as co-leader of the Institutes Council for the Microeconomics of Competitiveness (MOC) programme at the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness, led by Professor Michael Porter, at Harvard Business School.
Deborah Rowland
March 2017 Thinker of the Month
Co-author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008), and now, Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley, 2017), Deborah is a leading light thinker, speaker, writer, coach and practitioner in the field of leading large complex change. Rowland has personally led change in major global organizations including Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide and PepsiCo. She also founded and grew a consulting firm that pioneered original research in the field, the latest efforts of which were accepted as a paper at the 2016 Academy of Management.
Alexander Betts
February 2017 Thinker of the Month
Betts is professor of forced migration and international affairs, and director of the Refugee Studies Centre, at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the politics and economics of refugees. He is the author of a number of books, including Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (Oxford University Press, 2016). His recent TED talk “Our refugee system is failing; here’s how we can fix it” has over 740,000 viewings.
Soren Kaplan
December 2016 & January 2017 Thinker of the Month
Soren Kaplan is the author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a contributor to FastCompany, a globally recognized keynote speaker, and the Founder of InnovationPoint.
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
November 2016 Thinker of the Month
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is the world’s leading champion of project management. He is the creator of the concept Projects Inc., which argues that project management is the lingua franca of the business and personal worlds from the C-suite to managing your career or relationships.
Margarita Mayo
October 2016 Thinker of the Month
Professor of leadership at IE Business School in Madrid, and a visiting professor at ESMT – the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.
Erica Dhawan
September 2016 Thinker of the Month
Founder and CEO of Cotential, now champion of the idea of connectional intelligence. Co-author of Get Big Things Done (St. Martin’s Press, 2015).
Lauren Noël & Christie Hunter Arscott
August 2016 Thinker of the Month
Lauren’s work focuses on engaging, advancing and inspiring women in the first decade of their careers. She is an active researcher and writer on such topics as: ‘Be the Company Millennial Women Love’ (London Business School Review, May 2015), ‘How to Be a Company for Millennial Women’ (Diversity Executive, July 2015), ‘What Executives Need to Know about Millennial Women’ (ICEDR, 2015), and ‘How Women Take Charge of their Careers’ (Business Strategy Review, Autumn 2014).
Christie is an internationally recognized millennial expert on gender and generational strategies, most recently involved in the development and launch of QUEST. As an independent strategic adviser and researcher, and former Deputy Leader of Deloitte Consulting’s US Diversity & Inclusion Service Offering, Christie has helped organizations across industries and sectors recruit, retain and advance the next generation of women leaders. Her clients include Fortune 500 companies, national government entities, leading talent research bodies and others. Her work spans North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean.
Amy Edmondson
July 2016 Thinker of the Month
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Edmondson teaches and writes on leadership, teams and organizational learning.
David Burkus
June 2016 Thinker of the Month
David Burkus is a best-selling author, an award-winning podcaster, and management professor. In 2015, he was named one of the emerging thought leaders most likely to shape the future of business by Thinkers50, the world’s premier ranking of management thinkers.
His latest book, Under New Management, challenges the traditional and widely accepted principles of business management and proves that they are outdated, outmoded, or simply don’t work — and reveals what does. He is also the author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas. David is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. His work has been featured in Fast Company, Inc, the Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and CBS This Morning.
2015
Linda Scott
January/February 2015 Thinker of the Month
Linda Scott is DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Linda is best known for her creation of the concept of the Double X Economy – a perspective which describes the global economy of women in both the developed and developing world, and the roles of women not only as consumers, but as investors, donors and workers. She writes a blog called The Double X Economy, as well as blogging for Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek on gender issues.
Whitney Johnson
March 2015 Thinker of the Month
Whitney Johnson is a Founder and Managing Director of Springboard Fund, and a co-founder of Clayton Christensen’s investment firm, where they led the $8 million seed round for Korea’s Coupang, currently valued at $2.2 billion. Previously, she was an Institutional Investor-ranked analyst for eight consecutive years.
Dambisa Moyo
April 2015 Thinker of the Month
Dambisa Moyo is a marathon-running author and international economist who analyses the macroeconomy and global affairs. She is on the boards of Barclays Bank, SABMiller and Barrick Gold. She was an economist at Goldman Sachs, where she worked for nearly a decade, and was a consultant to the World Bank. She was named by TIME Magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum.
Hal Gregersen
May 2015 Thinker of the Month
The Executive Director for the MIT Sloan School’s Center of Leadership, Gregersen is coauthor (with Clay Christensen and Jeffrey Dyer) of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), and founder of The 4-24 Project, which is committed to building the next generation of innovators.
Jennifer Aaker
June 2015 Thinker of the Month
A social psychologist, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness: specifically she studies how individuals chose to spend their time and money, and when and why those choices are associated with lasting value.
Robin Chase
July 2015 Thinker of the Month
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur. She is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world; Buzzcar, a peer to peer carsharing service in France (now merged with Drivy); and GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. She is also co-founder and Executive Chairman of Veniam, a vehicle communications company building the networking fabric for the Internet of Moving Things.
Steven D’Souza
August 2015 Thinker of the Month
A globally recognized educator, adviser, author and speaker, he has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and London Business School, among others, and spoken at events throughout the world from Shanghai to Sofia. He is an Executive Fellow at IE Business School and has taught on IE programs in partnership with Chicago Booth GSB and Brown University.
Alf Rehn
September 2015 Thinker of the Month
Professor Alf Rehn is an accomplished academic and an internationally noted thought-leader in innovation and creativity, who is globally active as a keynote speaker and a strategic advisor. Through both bestselling books and an active social media presence (ranked as a “Top Professor on Twitter” in the Innovation category) he comments on the ways in which organizations face, support and fight change.
Henry Mintzberg
October 2015 Thinker of the Month
Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies, at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University in Montreal. His work has focused on the work of the manager, and how managers are trained and developed.The author or co-author of 15 books, Mintzberg is, perhaps, best known for his work on organizational forms – identifying five types of organization: simple structure; machine bureaucracy; professional bureaucracy; the divisionalized form; and the adhocracy.
2014
Liz Mellon
February 2014 Thinker of the Month
Mellon has spent the last 25 years designing and delivering leadership development programs, initially as a professor at London Business School and currently as executive director at Duke Corporate Education, the world’s leading executive education provider.
Monika Hamori
March 2014 Thinker of the Month
Hungarian-born and educated, Monika Hamori has been recognized as one of the world’s leading business school professors under the age of forty. A professor at Madrid’s IE Business School, Hamori’s research focuses on the realities of the job market. Her Harvard Business Review articles have looked at why young managers are perpetually looking for other jobs, common career fallacies and the route to the most senior jobs. Most recently she is the co-author of “The CEO experience trap” in MIT Sloan Management Review.
Peter Fisk
April 2014 Thinker of the Month
Peter Fisk founded and leads GeniusWorks, the brand and business innovation company, working with business leaders to see things differently, to imagine, develop and implement more inspired strategies for brands, innovation and marketing. He was previously CEO of the world’s largest marketing organization, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, worked in a variety of consulting businesses and line management roles, having started out as a nuclear physicist.
Nilofer Merchant
May 2014 Thinker of the Month
Nilofer Merchant teaches innovation at Stanford and Santa Clara Universities. In a meteoric 20-year career, Merchant has gone from being an administrator to becoming a CEO and then board member of a NASDAQ-traded company. Along the way she has gathered monikers such as “the Jane Bond of Innovation” for her ability to guide Fortune 500 and start-up companies.
Erin Meyer
June/July 2014 Thinker of the Month
Erin Meyer is a Professor at INSEAD and the programme director for INSEAD’s Managing Global Virtual Teams programme. Her work focuses on how the world’s most successful global leaders navigate the complexities of behavioural differences in a multi-cultural environment. Living and working in Africa, Europe, and the United States prompted Meyer’s study of the communication patterns and business systems of different parts of the world.
Gianpiero Petriglieri
September 2014 Thinker of the Month
Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at INSEAD, Petriglieri is the academic director of the school’s initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence, and chairs the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on new models of leadership. His interests bridge the domains of leadership, identity, adult development and experiential learning.
Navi Radjou
October 2014 Thinker of the Month
A fellow of the Cambridge Judge Business School, where he is the former director of the Centre for India & Global Business, Radjou is co-author (with Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja) of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Jossey Bass, 2012); and (with Prasad Kaipa) From Smart to Wise (Jossey Bass, 2013). He won the 2013 Thinkers50 India Innovation Award as well as the 2013 Thinkers50 Innovation Award.
Lee Newman
November/December 2014 Thinker of the Month
Lee Newman is a Professor at IE Business School, where he also serves as Dean of Innovation and Behavior. His work focuses on Behavioral Fitness, understanding the critical in-the-moment behaviors that distinguish high-performers in the workplace — and helping individuals and teams train these behaviors to ensure their long-term success.