Roger Martin

Roger Martin's Key Accomplishments Include . . .
Roger Martin has served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management since 1998. He is also an advisor on strategy to the CEO’s of several major global corporations. In 2007, Roger Martin was named a BusinessWeek “B-School All-Star” for being one of the “10 most influential business professors in the world.” In 2009, he was named one of the “Top 50 management thinkers in the world” by The Times of London and included on their prestigious Thinkers 50 list.

Roger Martin writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for BusinessWeek.com’s Innovation and Design Channel. He is also a regular contributor to Washington Post’s On Leadership blog and to Financial Times’ Judgment Call column.

Roger Martin has published several books, including: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets-and The Rest Of Us-Can Harness The Power Of True Partnership, The Future of the MBA: Designing the Thinker of the Future and Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers.

As a sought-after keynote and workshop speaker, Roger Martin’s clients include: AIGA Make/Think Memphis, DMI San Francisco, Skoll World Forum (Oxford), P&G, Target, Microsoft, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Genentech, and University of Dayton Center for learning and Executive Development.
Roger Martin received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, and his MBA from the Harvard Business School.

More About Roger Martin . . .
Roger Martin serves on the Boards of Thomson Reuters Corporation and Research in Motion and is a trustee of The Hospital for Sick Children.

• Integrative Thinking

  Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each.

• Design Thinking

  Design Thinking balances analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, enabling an organization to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. A design-thinking organization is capable of effectively advancing knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm, gaining a cost advantage over its competitors along the way. And with that cost advantage, it can redirect its design thinking capacity to solve the next important mystery and advance still further ahead of its competitors. In this way, the design-thinking organization is capable of achieving lasting and regenerating competitive advantage.

• Strategic Choice Architecture

  Strategic Choice Architecture is the process by which strategic choices are identified and structured so that they can be made in a way that leads naturally to productive action for the organization.

• Incentives, Executive Compensation and Governance

  Incentives, Executive Compensation and Governance are three important topics that are linked to one another. The corporations that are such a big part of the productivity and prosperity equation require governance that ensures that they are using their financial, human and physical assets constructively. A key facet of the governance of modern corporations is the compensation of executives, especially of the CEO, for which the board of directors has sole authority. Executive compensation, in turn is a function of how we think about incentives that can be used to shape and encourage executive behavior and action.

• Jurisdictional Competitiveness and Prosperity

  Jurisdictional Competitiveness and Prosperity defines the relationship between the competitiveness of a jurisdiction – whether city-region, state or province, or nation – and the degree to which its inhabitants enjoy high and rising prosperity. Prosperity is a function of the institutions and infrastructures that enable financial, human, knowledge, social and physical assets to be combined so as to produce more valuable outputs than those of competing jurisdictions.

• Social Innovation

  Social Innovation refers to strategies, concepts or ideas that are aimed at strengthening civil society and making the world in which we live a better place for society broadly. There are many forms of social innovation with many goals. My interest is particularly in two areas of social innovation. The first is the role that corporations can play in being better citizens, showing better stewardship for their world. The second is in the practice of social entrepreneurship— that is, entrepreneurial activities aimed more so at making the world a better place than making the entrepreneur rich.