Rita McGrath

Rita McGrath is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, where she is also academic director in executive education, and she works on the question that sits upstream of every change program: how an organization sees a shift coming while it still has room to choose a response.

Seeing Around Corners, published in 2019, is about strategic inflection points, the moments when the assumptions a business was built on stop holding. Her argument is that these are visible well before they are undeniable, and that the early signals are usually held by people at the edges of the organization rather than at the top, where they are filtered out on the way up. The practical content is how to build the listening posts that surface them and how to run small experiments against them before the shift is forced.

The End of Competitive Advantage, published in 2013, made the case that sustained advantage is no longer the normal state and that companies should get better at exiting positions gracefully, an unusual thing to tell an audience whose planning cycle assumes the opposite. With Ian MacMillan she wrote The Entrepreneurial Mindset in 2000, MarketBusters in 2005 and Discovery Driven Growth in 2009, developing discovery-driven planning, a method for committing to a venture in stages against tested assumptions rather than a fixed forecast.

Thinkers50 gave her its Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy in 2013 and she has been ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers. In 2022 the Strategic Management Society awarded her the C.K. Prahalad Award for scholarly impact. She holds a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, a master's in public administration from Columbia, and a PhD from the Wharton School.

She is booked by leadership teams who suspect their industry is turning and want a way to test that rather than argue about it. The session works as a keynote and is often paired with a closed executive session, because the useful output is a list of the specific signals that organization should be watching, which is not something a ballroom can produce.