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Rita McGrath

Founder at Valize

New York, United States

Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after advisor and a speaker. Rita is considered one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation. She is the winner of the 2022 CK Prahalad award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society, and in the same year was inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame. She ranks among the top 10 management thinkers globally, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. Rita’s most recent book is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Rita is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

Rita is one of the most widely published authors in the Harvard Business Review, including the best-selling article “Discovery Driven Planning” (1995), which was recognized as an early articulation of today’s “lean” startup philosophy and was praised by Clayton Christensen as one of the most important ideas in management - ever. She is also a highly-respected academic researcher whose work has won awards from the most prestigious management journals.

On the lighter side, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the 25 smartest women to follow on Twitter.

Rita is recognized as one of a small group of experts who have built today’s best-in-class innovation practices. She has won many awards for her work and impact, including the “Theory to Practice” award from the Vienna Strategy Forum and multiple “best book” awards for her work.

Rita joined Columbia Business School in 1993. Prior to life in academia, she was an IT director, worked in the political arena, and founded two startups. She received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is active on all the main social media platforms, such as Twitter @rgmcgrath.

She is married and is proud to be the mother of two delightful grownups.

For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com.

Available For: Advising, Authoring, Consulting, Speaking
Travels From: New York, NY
Speaking Topics: The new strategy playbook, Seeing Around Corners, Winning Through Innovation

Rita McGrath Points
Academic 0
Author 187
Influencer 408
Speaker 3
Entrepreneur 20
Total 618

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Company
Minimum Project Size: N/A
Average Hourly Rate: N/A
Number of Employees: 1-10
Company Founded Date: 2016
Media Experience: 30 years
Last Media Training: 12/27/2023
Last Media Interview: 12/27/2023

Areas of Expertise

Business Strategy 36.51
Careers 30.16
Change Management 35.99
Coaching
Customer Experience
Digital Disruption
Digital Transformation
Ecosystems
Entrepreneurship
Future of Work 30.02
Innovation 32.64
Lean Startup
Management 36.52
Startups

Industry Experience

Aerospace & Defense
Agriculture & Mining
Building Materials, Clay & Glass
Chemicals
Consumer Products
Engineering & Construction
Federal & Public Sector
Financial Services & Banking
Forest Products & Paper
Healthcare
High Tech & Electronics
Higher Education & Research
Insurance
Manufacturing
Metal Products
Pharmaceuticals
Professional Services
Retail
Telecommunications
Utilities

Publications

2 Article/Blogs
The Permissionless Corporation
Harvard Business Review
January 11, 2023
Technology is empowering employees to make their own decisions. Organizational structures need to catch up.

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Tags: Careers, Future of Work, Innovation

Identifying and Leveraging Inflection Points to Gain Competitive Advantages: Rita McGrath Explains
CBS
August 23, 2021
For nearly 30 years, McGrath has been a beloved faculty member of Columbia Business School Executive Education. She’s also written five books, including the New York Times bestseller The End of Competitive Advantage and her most recent work, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Management, Education

5 Author Newsletters
Could you benefit from Belonging to a Peer-to-Peer Network?
LinkedIn
February 20, 2024
Executive development, or more specifically executive education, truly got going in the United States and Europe after the second world war. Universities such as Harvard introduced the “Advanced Management Program” and other high-level courses designed to teach practical business leadership skills to executives who might have experience in family firms or in the military but not in the increasingly large global firms that represented an ever-larger portion of the economies of much of the developed world.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Management, Education

Why are so few people talking about the massive wealth transfer to women?
LinkedIn
February 13, 2024
What would you think? The 50’s? 60’s? What if I were to tell you that it wasn’t until the 1980s that some fundamental cases were settled that would change women’s rights to their own property forever.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

Fighting Back against the algorithms – Community and the redemption of Taylorism?
Thought Sparks
January 24, 2024
As algorithms have come to dominate the lives of gig workers, treating many like poorly performing robots, community structures are emerging that allow workers to spontaneously organize – and create a potentially powerful counterforce.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

An inflection point comes for Pharmaceutical Companies
Thought Sparks
January 16, 2024
The Inflation Reduction Act for the first time allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drugmakers for pharmaceutical prices. It also contained a much less discussed provision regarding patent protections. The law sets different exemption times for “small molecule” drugs that can be taken in pill form and “large molecule” ones that have to be injected or infused. This has the potential to change the structure of incentives for the Pharma industry and not necessarily in a way that benefits patients

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

WFH? RTO? Remembering the Allen Curve and Why It Matters Now
LinkedIn
December 12, 2023
For all the passionate conversations about new working arrangements for the knowledge working classes, we seem to have glossed right over one of the most robust findings in communication theory.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Management

3 Books
Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
September 19, 2019
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.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business
Harvard Business Review Press
June 04, 2013
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.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Innovation

Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity
Harvard Business
February 03, 2009
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?

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

1 Founder
Valize
Valize
July 06, 2016
We want to be the company that helps you build a better future for your people, your community, and your investors.

We uniquely combine three elements to architect the pathway to long-term healthy growth for your organization and your people.

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Tags: Innovation, Management

1 Media Interview
Friday Fireside Chat - Rita McGrath & Zeynep Ton Full Session
RMG
June 26, 2023
Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, sought-after speaker, and longtime professor at Columbia Business School. As one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth, Rita’s work is regularly published in the Harvard Business Review. She is consistently ranked among the Top 10 management thinkers in the world

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

1 Webinar
Friday Fireside Chat - Rita McGrath & Matt Abrahams, author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter
RMG
January 04, 2024
You haven't missed it! In my first Friday Fireside Chat of 2024, I'll be talking to award-winning podcast host and communications expert Matt Abrahams. He'll share time-tested techniques for rocking that unexpected conversation in which you have a great opportunity to make an impression. Much better than flubbing it and wishing you got the chance for a do-over.

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Tags: Business Strategy, Change Management, Management

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