Travels from United Kingdom
Costas Markides's speaking fee falls within range: $25,000 to $30,000
Costas Markides is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and holds the Robert P. Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership at London Business School. He has been at LBS since 1990 and has served as Chairman of the Strategy Area for six years and as member of the Academic Board of Executive Education at the school for four years. He also served on the Board of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) for six years.
He is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on strategy, business model innovation and diversification. His research has explored how established companies could pursue radical or disruptive innovation and how they can compete with two business models in the same industry. He also examined how companies create a culture of continuous innovation and the role that individual managers play in making a company more innovative. He is currently studying how the digital context is affecting how much firms can diversify and the type of capabilities that underpin successful diversification. He is also exploring how firms can grow without diluting their differentiated strategic positioning.
An internationally acclaimed teacher and conference speaker, Professor Markides has won multiple teaching awards at London Business School, including the Excellence in Teaching Award Across All Programmes (and Executive Education) in 1999, the first time the award was ever given.
A native of Cyprus, he received his BA (Distinction) and MA in Economics from Boston University, and his MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School. He has published ten books, including: All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy (2000); Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets (2005); Game-Changing Strategies (2008); Organizing for the New Normal: Prepare your company for the journey of continuous disruption (2021); Business Model Innovation (2023); and Diversification in the world of data and AI (2025).
Costa Markides uses three true stories to examine the baffling phenomenon of why we as society in general don’t actively stop to help strangers in need. He recounts the 1964 murder of a New York City waitress, which was witnessed by at least 39 people – none of whom called the police; a hit-and-run accident that injured an elderly pedestrian in Connecticut; and a 1970s Stanford psychology experiment that revealed that even 3 out of 10 priests - when under a time constraint - would not stop to assist a screaming elderly man. Reviewing these three cases, Professor Markides remarks that it wasn’t a lack of education or knowledge that stopped people in each situation from helping the person in need. Regarding the priests featured in his last example, he points out, “They’re supposed to stop. You practically pay them to stop. It’s in their key performance indicators to stop…Did these priests know what they had to do? Of course, they did. They didn’t have to go back to school to learn.” He ponders then, what can be done to create a society where citizens help others in a moment of crisis.
Corporate entrepreneurship authority, Costa Markides brings tons of excitement to the stage with his upbeat interactive style of presenting strategies for going beyond fresh new ideas and actually diffusing innovation throughout your company and society. Innovation is the only source of competitive advantage in today’s quickly changing world and it takes an organization to innovate; Professor Markides walks you through real life examples of how you can institutionalize innovation, so that your entire team will implement it. Whether your company is facing good times or bad, Professor Markides will show you how you can constantly spot opportunities and reinvent the ways you offer value to consumers.
Beyond the Aha Moment: How Innovation Really Happens
The biggest mistake that people make when it comes to innovation is to think that the bottleneck is the lack of good ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real problem in innovation is the implementation of new ideas to create value. Even the best of ideas will fail unless someone “pushes” them in the organisation to get them properly implemented. But who should be doing the pushing? And how? There is a lot of academic evidence that suggests answers to these questions. Markides will explore how innovations diffuse in organizations (and societies) and what that implies for managers. Real examples will be provided to highlight the points made.
Every Crisis Has an Opportunity
The companies that survive in difficult times are not the ones that look at the crisis as a threat; and are not the ones that look at it as an opportunity. They are the ones that look at it as BOTH a threat AND an opportunity. Looking at it as a threat gives us some benefits (e.g. it creates a sense of urgency and galvanizes resources). But it also comes with costs (e.g. it makes us short-term oriented and reactive). Similarly, looking at it as an opportunity gives us some benefits (e.g. long-term and strategic outlook). But it also comes with costs (e.g. no urgency and no action). So, the trick is to be able to approach it as both a threat and an opportunity.
It’s easy to see what the threat is but what is the opportunity? Markides will point 3 areas where you could look for opportunities:
Because the crisis has created a sense of urgency and has lowered people’s resistance to change, it would be easier to push through necessary changes—so exploit the opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t normally be able to do.
An economic downturn does not mean that there is no market—it just means that there is “less” market. So you will need better effort to capture it. Markides will describe how to improve the effectiveness of your selling efforts in such a tough economic climate. In tough times, the financial resources are limited—this means that you cannot “throw money” at the problems. Rather, you have to get innovative in how you approach your tasks. Markides will explain what this means and how to improve our own individual creativity.
These may all sound like common sense ideas and they are. The problem is that even though you know all these things, you are unlikely to do them! This is because knowing something doesn’t mean that we will do it. This is a very well known problem in organizations and academics call it the “Knowing-Doing Gap”. Individuals that succeed in overcoming this gap are the ones that succeed even in difficult economic times.
Delighting Clients in a World of Temporary Advantage
To delight clients, the first requirement is to offer them a unique value proposition. In other words, when the client asks: “why should I come to you rather than go to any one of your competitors?” you should be able to say: “because I can offer you everything that my competitors are offering you plus these additional benefits that nobody else can offer.” This means that you cannot be everything to everybody! You need to select your clients strategically so that what you can uniquely offer fits exactly the selected clients’ needs. This unique value proposition must be embodied in the organization’s brand.
But having a unique value proposition is not enough. The promise of the brand must be delivered to the client not once or twice but all the time. And it has to be delivered not only by one or two people in the organization but by everybody. For such a wonderful state of affairs to emerge, these behaviors must become part of the culture of the organization. It is the responsibility of top management to develop the culture of their firms so that “delighting clients on a continuous basis” becomes automatic. The question then becomes: “how can we build such a culture?”
How to Make Your Organizations More Innovative In today’s hypercompetitive world, innovation is the only source of competitive advantage. Organizations must continuously innovate to stay one step ahead of competition. But innovation is not just creativity; and it is not just the province of top management. For innovation to become a source of competitive advantage, it must be institutionalised so that it takes place anywhere and at anytime in the organization. How to institutionalise innovation is a real challenge for companies and this presentation will provide insights on how to do it. Top management has a key role to play in this and we will also explore how the top people can set the right example in the organization. Real life examples will be provided to support the generalizations made.
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All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy
Constantinos Markides contends that the essence of business strategy is to allow a company to create and exploit a unique strategic position in its industry. To do so, the company must make clear and explicit choices based on the answers to three difficult questions: Who should I target as customers? What products or services should I offer them? How should I do this in an efficient way? Any company engaged in strategy making must raise these questions, identify possible answers, and then choose what to do and what not to do. The objective should be to come up with ideas that differentiate the firm from its competitors – and thus stake out a unique strategic position. In “All the Right Moves”, a highly practical handbook on the fundamentals of strategy, Markides helps managers zero in on the critical choices that lie at the heart of all innovative strategies. More important, Markides argues that even the best of strategies have a limited life. It is not enough to develop a unique strategic position or to improve the existing one. Companies must continually create and colonize new strategic positions, a difficult if not impossible task for many established firms.
Markides explains how to overcome the obstacles to innovation so that even well-established companies can innovate by breaking the rules of the game. “All the Right Moves” reveals how creative thinking leads to strategic innovation – the ‘breakthroughs’ that separate winning strategists from also-rans. Markides approaches strategic thinking as a creative process in which examining an issue from a variety of angles often proves more productive than merely gathering data, and experimenting with new ideas can be more effective than conducting much scientific analysis. He poses key questions for readers to ask as he guides them through a step-by-step framework for developing their strategic thinking skills. In a refreshingly clear and practical approach, “All the Right Moves” offers concrete advice for thinking through the tough choices that all business strategists must face. It distills the important elements of strategy into an easy-to-follow system for crafting today’s -and tomorrow’s- breakthrough business strategies.
Organizing for the New Normal: Prepare Your Company for the Journey of Continuous Disruption
We live in a world of continuous disruption. Before we have a chance to respond to one disruption, another hits. Before we finish one transformation journey, we need to embark on another. How do you prepare the organization for this new normal of continuous disruption? This is the challenge that every organization is now facing, no matter how successful their digital transformation of the past decade has been.
Organizing for the New Normal explores how to prepare the organization for this unique challenge. How do you develop a strategy for what is coming next while you are busily driving your current transformation? And how do you convince emotionally exhausted employees to join you on the journey? The book does not provide a ready-made recipe for success, but rather explores how to put together the ingredients that will improve the odds of success.
Organizing for the New Normal outlines the leadership competencies critical for success in the “new normal”, such as: · How to create a “permanent” sense of urgency and an organization-wide unease with the status quo · How to convince people to exploit disruption as an opportunity when all they see around them are the negative consequences of disruption · How to institutionalize into the DNA of the organization the day to day behaviors that would allow us to identify and respond to change early-and how to achieve this in a decentralized way · How to develop a strategic response that is innovative and aims to attack the disruption rather than defend against it.
Diversification in the World of Data and AI (Elements in Business Strategy)
The datafication of digital reality and the diffusion of increasingly powerful AI systems have transformed the context within which diversification takes place, resulting in new realities for firms and necessitating new organizational capabilities. Building on their own field research and the existing literature on digitalization and diversification, the authors show how external technological and market changes influence the extent and type of diversification that firms can undertake. They argue that to succeed with digital diversification, new capabilities are needed and that these capabilities are not distributed evenly across firms. Only firms that possess these capabilities will undertake more diversification, with all other firms remaining focused. The authors finally argue that the necessary structures and the appropriate management of business units will differ from those used in the past because the digital context has brought to the fore new problems and risks for diversified firms. These are explored in this Element.
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