Travels from New York, USA
Rita McGrath's speaking fee falls within range: $50,000 to $75,000
Rita McGrath, one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation, is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world by the prestigious Thinkers50 and won their #1 award in strategy. She is a trusted partner and strategic advisor in the C-suites of many of the country’s biggest and most well-known companies—especially as they work to grow, evolve, reinvent themselves, and see around corners.
Rita is known for her energy, positivity, storytelling, and ability to connect with audiences. She is also a sought-after corporate speaker, a long-time educator at Columbia Business School, and the author and host of the popular podcast and newsletter Thought Sparks, available on YouTube.
She is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on strategic inflection points, the topic of her most recent book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She is the author of five books on leadership, business, and organizational management, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
Her work on discovery-driven growth was praised by the late legendary management thinker Clayton Christensen as offering “some of the most important ideas of management and strategy that have ever been developed.” She is currently working on a book full of humor and insight for business leaders, aimed at helping organizations become “2% less stupid” by adopting permissionless structures.
Rita regularly sits down for in-depth conversations with high-level authors and leaders in business for her popular Thought Sparks podcast. She also writes a regular Thought Sparks newsletter and shares insights across social media platforms, including LinkedIn, where she has more than 45,000 followers.
Known for her energy, positivity, storytelling, and ability to connect with audiences, Rita is a sought-after corporate speaker and a long-time educator at Columbia Business School. She leads its popular Executive Education course Leading Strategic Growth and Change, guest-lectures in other courses, and is active in initiatives such as the launch of its Think Bigger Innovation Hub. She also serves as faculty director for some of Columbia’s prestigious custom programs, learning experiences designed specifically for individual organizations.
One of the most frequent contributors to the Harvard Business Review, she publishes regularly in other premier journals such as the MIT Sloan Management Review. She was awarded the prestigious C. K. Prahalad Award from the Strategic Management Society, recognizing scholarly impact on practice. She has also won many other awards for her work and impact, including the “Theory to Practice” award from the Vienna Strategy Forum, the “Best Paper” award from the Academy of Management Review, and multiple “Best Book” awards.
A proud graduate of Barnard College (B.A.), the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.), and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (M.P.A.), Rita is also co-leader of the Silicon Guild, a group of thought leaders and best-selling authors who write about trends in business, society, and culture.
Rita McGrath explores how we can form a new playbook for business strategy in an environment where fresh advantages have an increasingly limited window in which they can be exploited. Gone are the days when your company could ride years of security on its unique competitive advantage, Rita remarks, pointing out that companies such as Kodak fell victim to “nostalgia management.” Today organizations must instead become proficient at freeing resources to fund the future and creating infrastructures that streamline the incubation, testing, and scaling of new ideas as well as their entry into the market. “Even in a world of transient competitive advantages, that’s not a recipe for disaster,” Rita states. “There are many things you can do that will help you survive and navigate these waters, and even thrive doing it.”
From IT to financial institutions, Rita McGrath has helped audiences from a wide range of sectors reshape the way they do business. Rita outlines effective methodologies for dealing with uncertainty, better allocating resources, and managing the failures that are a natural part of the process of innovation. The trusted thought leader will deliver a fresh perspective on the challenges your organization or industry faces along with the tools to develop a plan of action for discovering and leveraging opportunities in a volatile economy.
Catch a Wave: The New Strategy Playbook
We’ve all seen the story play out. A company experiences phenomenal success, their CEO makes the cover of notable business publications, and business writers use them as examples for the rest of us. Then, somehow, the firm gets into trouble. Competitors capture their customers, margins shrink, investors grumble, activists turn up, the CEO, or a succession of CEOs, are shown the door, and, eventually the company disappears or becomes irrelevant. A root cause, McGrath argues, is the pervasive belief that a competitive advantage, once established, is enduring. This belief leads to complacency, inward focus, loss of customer engagement and a stifling of innovation. Instead, smart strategists leave old assumptions at the door and pursue opportunities to establish and exploit transient advantages.
You will learn: • Why too much stability can be your enemy – and how to embrace continuous reconfiguration • Why existing metrics will lead you astray – and what you should be measuring instead • Why healthy disengagement from a fading business is one of the most important practices to get right • How it’s a trap to believe your most important competitors are others in your industry • Why innovation is not optional • How to lead when command-and-control doesn’t work • How to manage talent in a ‘tour of duty’ context
Discovery Driven Planning: Conquering Death By Spreadsheet
You have what you think is a great idea to pursue an attractive new opportunity. Before you can make progress, though, you are hit with a barrage of questions that you have no way of answering. “What will the ROI of this venture be?” “how long will it take to launch” “how will it affect our existing product lines?”. If you’re like people in many organizations, you will dutifully put together a conventional business plan, with details about the idea, spreadsheets that project what the financials could look like and GANTT or similar charts laying out the project timeline. And even as you are doing all this, you know in your heart of hearts that this is more a quantification of fantasy than it is likely to bring your idea to life. There is a better way.
In the seminal work that formed the basis for the Lean Startup movement, McGrath describes how to create a plan for a new venture that gets you to early answers fast, by focusing on the most critical assumptions that you need to convert to facts. It’s disciplined, but it’s a discipline that comes straight out of the entrepreneurial mindset.
You will learn: • Why people make so many costly mistakes in high-uncertainty situations • How to define success so that you can specify what must be true to achieve it • How to avoid being unrealistic about what your venture might be able to achieve • How to break a large, complex, project down into manageable checkpoints • How to compare different potential business models • How to think in terms of cost to learn rather than total project budgeting
Snow Melts from the Edges: How to See Around Corners
Companies that are blindsided by changes in their environment or disruptions in their competitive space have one thing in common: Their executives and decision-makers somehow got disconnected from the “edges” of the organization—where small changes start brewing before their implications are obvious to everybody. So too, when a big opportunity is missed or dismissed. Why, for instance, did Microsoft initially miss something like five major shifts in underlying technology as it tried to defend its Windows franchise, and why is it regaining relevance now?
“Your insight generated great engagement and comments from leaders sharing eye-opening observations and building on your examples throughout. You delivered the inspiration and illustration desired and it was exactly the right focus and challenge for this team. The future-focus theme was the perfect close to our leadership summit.” – Rui Barbas, CSO, Nestle
“…‘fantastic, mind-blowing’, such a smart fast thinking strategic person.” -Elisabeth Drzaic-Lan, CEO, Innovators Serendipity Academy
“Rita McGrath is a dynamic woman who thinks as fast and as powerfully as the brightest managers in any company, and can confidently challenge any executive on raising the bar of ambition and improving the odds of success. She creates lasting change in the way executives view their strategies and the possibilities that sound thinking can create for customers and companies.” – Steve Newman, Program Director for Executive development, Ericsson
“I was priviliged to be in attendance to hear your comments on Intelligent Failures. Your style is engaging and the material waspresented in a way that resonated with me, and with some of the issues we are having in our company today. You caused me to re-think some of our efforts here.” – John Sung, Sr. VP, CIO, Alfa Group
“Your presentation and real life examples provided practical information and a useful checklist for our participants. The breakout sessions provided us with an opportunity to brain-storm as a team with helpful oversight from you.” – Nancy McKinstry, CEO, Walters Kluwers
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Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen
The first prescriptive, innovative guide to seeing inflection points before they happen—and how to harness these disruptive influences to give your company a strategic advantage.
Paradigmatic shifts in the business landscape, known as inflection points, can either create new, entrepreneurial opportunities (see Amazon and Netflix) or they can lead to devastating consequences (e.g., Blockbuster and Toys R Us). Only those leaders who can “see around corners”–that is, spot the disruptive inflection points developing before they hit–are poised to succeed in this market.
Columbia Business School Professor and corporate consultant Rita McGrath contends that inflection points, though they may seem sudden, are not random. Every seemingly overnight shift is the final stage of a process that has been subtly building for some time. Armed with the right strategies and tools, smart businesses can see these inflection points coming and use them to gain a competitive advantage. Seeing Around Corners is the first hands-on guide to anticipating, understanding, and capitalizing on the inflection points shaping the marketplace.
The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now.
In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant.
Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage.
This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today.
Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.
Discovery-Driven Growth You’ve been charged with growing your business. Incremental growth can no longer deliver the results you need. You need truly dynamic growth—and you need to achieve it without risking a hugely expensive gamble. How can you encourage innovative new ventures and pursue ambitious growth while minimizing risk?
In Discovery-Driven Growth, authors McGrath and MacMillan show how companies can plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence. By carefully framing their strategic growth opportunities, testing each project assumption against a series of checkpoints, and creating a culture that acts on evidence and learning instead of blind stumbling, companies can better control their costs, minimize surprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects—before it’s too late.
Providing tools that will help you select and better assess the potential of any strategic venture, from new product lines to entirely new businesses, the authors outline a comprehensive process that lets you identify, manage, and leverage your company’s full portfolio of opportunities. By reducing up-front costs and eliminating unnecessary risks, you’ll be able to avoid missteps and explore more options to create the breakthrough growth that your business requires.
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