Books by Roger L. Martin

"If you could imagine the ultimate guide to the essentials of strategy and management, from one of the world's top business thinkers, what would that look like? It would look like this book. Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised CEOs of some of the world's most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a "model"-a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn't work, the response was typically to just apply it again-with greater enthusiasm. Martin took a fresh, critical approach to helping. When company leaders came to him with fundamental questions-How do you decide where to play and how to win? What is the key to shaping and changing corporate culture? How can you design a successful, sustainable innovation process? -his first response was to break the spell of the current model with a memo articulating a new way to think about the problem at hand, and a more powerful and effective way to successfully overcome it. Over time, these ideas worked their way into Martin's many Harvard Business Review articles. Now, for the first time, they appear together in A New Way to Think. With his trademark incisive intellect and clarity, Martin covers the entire breadth of the management landscape-illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing, and much more. Reading like a series of one-on-one sessions with one of the world's leading business thinkers, A New Way to Think is an essential primer for any current or aspiring business leader"--

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a gamechanging innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovativethey spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to anotherfrom mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

Who drives transformation in society? How do they do it?In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders--call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers--develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place.The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneuars actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context.Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.