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The Opposable Mind

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2009-07-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1422148106

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions including: What are the causal relationships at work here? and What are the implied trade-offs? Martin also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills by drawing on different kinds of knowledge including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, and The Opposable Mind helps you master this vital skill.

Creating Great Choices

Author: Jennifer Riel

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1633692973

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Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs. Insightful and instructive, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

A New Way to Think

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1647823528

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Named one of "10 Must-Read Career and Leadership Books For 2022" by Forbes The ultimate guide to the essentials of strategy and management, from one of the world's top business thinkers. Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the 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 typical response was just to 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 guide for any current or aspiring business leader.

When More Is Not Better

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1647820073

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American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: We have treated the economy as a machine, pursuing ever-greater efficiency as an inherent good. But efficiency has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with it has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economy, from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already-rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). With lucid analysis and engaging anecdotes, Martin argues that we must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policy makers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.

The Design of Business

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1422177807

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Most companies today have innovation envy. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative: they spend on R & D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants; but they still get disappointing results. Roger Martin argues that to innovate and win, companies need 'design thinking'.

The Opposable Mind

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1422139778

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'The Opposable Mind' promotes the idea that everyone can benefit from integrative thinking, which can be taught. The book reflects many actionable ideas, written in a tone that makes change seem easy.

Getting Beyond Better

Author: Roger L. Martin

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1633690695

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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.

Diaminds

Author: Mihnea C. Moldoveanu

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0802099912

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What constitutes successful thinking in business? What are the techniques used by some of the top minds in the business world to solve problems and create value? In Diaminds, Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin, creators of the Integrative Thinking curriculum at the Rotman School of Management, draw upon numerous case studies and interviews - as well as theories and models from cognitive psychology, epistemology, analytic philosophy, and semiotics - to present a new conception of successful intelligence that is immediately applicable to business situations. The 'diamind' (or dialogical mind) is characterized by a number of qualities: the ability to simultaneously hold opposing plans, models, and courses of action in mind while retaining the ability to act (bi-stability), logical depth and informational breadth in one's thinking processes (meliorism), the ability to choose among various representations of the world, the self, and others (choicefulness), and the capacity to think about how to analyse and solve a problem while at the same time thinking about the problem itself (polyphony). The authors discuss these concepts in detail, and provide examples and exercises throughout to encourage readers to examine and re-engineer their own thought patterns to develop these qualities and cultivate their own 'diaminds'.

The Heart of a Leader

Author: Ken Blanchard

Publisher: David C Cook

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1434766632

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Ken Blanchard, a highly respected figure in the fields of leadership and business, invites you into the world of influence through his extensive career insights in this inspirational leadership book. In The Heart of a Leader, you’ll learn about: Uncover the significance of making value-based decisions; Learn how to pursue excellence in every aspect of your life; Explore the vital role of integrity in leadership and personal growth; Embrace change as a source of growth and development; Empower those around you to achieve their full potential. Get ready to go on a journey toward effective leadership and personal growth. Bound to become a timeless classic on Christian inspirational leadership, this book offers teachings on values, excellence, integrity, change, and empowerment that will equip you with the essential tools to not only lead effectively but also inspire those around you.

Design Thinking

Author: Thomas Lockwood

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-02-16

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1581157347

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This thought-provoking and inspirational book covers such topics as: developing a solid creative process through “Visual Reflection Notebooks” and “Bring Play to Work”; understanding the artist’s unique identity in relation to the larger culture; building systems of support and collaboration; explaining how an artist’s needs and passions can lead to innovation and authenticity; using language to inspire visual creativity; responding to the Internet and changing concepts of what is public and private; and accepting digression as a creative necessity. Through the exercises and techniques outlined in Art Without Compromise*, the reader will develop new confidence to pursue individual goals and inspiration to explore new paths, along with motivation to overcome creative blocks. With a revised understanding of the relevance in their own work within the sphere of contemporary culture, the artist will come away with a clearer perspective on his or her past and future work and a critical eye for personal authenticity.