Roger Martin

Roger Martin has served as dean of the Rotman School of Management since September 1998.  Previously, Martin had spent 13 years as a Director of Monitor Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he served as co-head of the firm for two years.

Martin’s research work is in Integrative Thinking, Business Design, Corporate Social Responsibility and Country Competitiveness. He writes extensively on design and is a regular columnist for the BusinessWeek.com Innovation and Design Channel. Martin is also a regular contributor to The Washington Post’s ‘On Leadership’ blog, The Financial Times’ ‘Judgment Call’ column: and the Harvard Business Review’s ‘The Conversation’ blog. He has written nine Harvard Business Review articles and published three books: The Design of Business, The Opposable Mind and The Responsibility Virus. Martin co-wrote (with Mihnea Moldoveanu) The Future of the MBA and Diaminds.

In 2010, Martin was named one of the 27 ‘Most Influential Designers in the World’ by Business Week. In 2009, he was named by The Times (of London) and Forbes.com one of the 50 top management thinkers in the world. In 2007, he was named a Business Week 'B-School All-Star' for being one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world. Business Week also named Martin one of seven 'Innovation Gurus' in 2005, and in 2004, he won the Marshall McLuhan Visionary Leadership Award.

Martin serves on the Boards of Thomson Reuters Corporation, Research in Motion, The Skoll Foundation, the Canadian Credit Management Foundation, and Tennis Canada. He is a trustee of The Hospital for Sick Children and chair of the Ontario Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress.

A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Martin received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

• 1. Integrative Thinking

  Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each.
  
  Martin is devoted to helping students and executives improve their decision-making by distilling the thinking approach of highly successful leaders and imbedding it in MBA and executive curricula. Many years ago, he came to the conclusion that watching what highly successful leaders do is confusing and unhelpful. They do what they do because of the specifics of the situation; which is likely to be different from yours.
  
  His research has shown that while their actions vary widely, their method of thinking and deciding has strong common themes. He calls it Integrative Thinking and is demonstrating with business students and corporate and NGO executives that it can be taught.

• 2. Design Thinking

  Design Thinking balances analytical thinking and intuitive thinking, enabling an organization to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. A design-thinking organization is capable of effectively advancing knowledge from mystery to heuristic to algorithm, gaining a cost advantage over its competitors along the way. And with that cost advantage, it can redirect its design thinking capacity to solve the next important mystery and advance still further ahead of its competitors. In this way, the design-thinking organization is capable of achieving lasting and regenerating competitive advantage.
  
  Martin is devoted to helping companies, who tend to be ruled by analytical thinking, integrate into their thinking pattern, the best of intuitive thinking, which is typically the thinking pattern of artists and designers. Analytical thinkers tend to see "creatives" as potentially useful but quite scary because they don't understand how "creatives" think – if they think at all! And creatives tend to see business-people as closed to new and potentially powerful ways of looking at things. As a consequence, they are more inclined to fight with or detach from one another – not utilize one another's unique capability.
  
  He is committed to helping exploitation and reliability-driven analytical thinkers and exploration and validity-driven intuitive thinkers understand why and how they need each other and why the higher goal for each is to develop their design thinking capacity. This is the capacity to combine the best of analytical and intuitive thinking into a reasoning capability that balances exploitation and exploration; that seeks reliability and validity; that provides the fastest and best movement through the Knowledge Funnel; and provides lasting competitive advantage in the 21st century.

• 3. Strategic Choice Architecture

  Strategic Choice Architecture is the process by which strategic choices are identified and structured so that they can be made in a way that leads naturally to productive action for the organization.
  
  Martin is devoted to helping senior management teams improve the architecture of their strategy choices. They often find themselves struggling to determine what choices really need to be tackled to advance the cause of their organizations. And when they tackle whatever choices they think important, they tend to struggle to make the choices and even more to see those choices convert to action. As a result, there is perceived to be a crisis of 'implementation' in organizations. Rather Martin sees the problem as one of how strategic choices are made. He has created a process called Strategic Choice Structuring which is designed to help management teams focus on the high-value choices, make inspired choices, and make them in a way that leads to productive action. It is a process that major companies like Procter & Gamble and Dun & Bradstreet utilize throughout their strategic processes.
  
  Incentives, Executive Compensation & Governance
  
  Incentives, Executive Compensation and Governance are three important topics that are linked to one another. The corporations that are such a big part of the productivity and prosperity equation require governance that ensures that they are using their financial, human and physical assets constructively. A key facet of the governance of modern corporations is the compensation of executives, especially of the CEO, for which the board of directors has sole authority. Executive compensation, in turn is a function of how we think about incentives that can be used to shape and encourage executive behavior and action.
  
  He is devoted to influencing fundamental change in how we think about incentives, executive compensation and governance. Practice in each of the three areas is influenced by weak and/or flawed theories – theories that are deeply ingrained in modern corporate life. As a result governance systems underperform and executive compensation systems don't result in the behaviors we would want. The dominant response to the failures is to blame the "implementation" of the system in question. And what inevitably ensues is tweaking of the existing system – with a vain hope that something good will happen.
  
  He hopes, with research and writing, to help those involved in governance and executive compensation to be able to constructively question their assumptions about incentives and accept fundamental changes to compensation and governance practices.
  
  Capital versus Talent
  
  Martin believes there as a modern and very important battle being waged between capital – i.e. shareholders – and talent – i.e. senior and specialized executives – for the spoils of their joint activity. Before 1980, talent worked placidly for management without making huge demands of compensation. But then talent woke up and ever since has been working assiduously to take an ever-bigger piece of the economic pie, frustrating and angering capital.
  
  Executive Compensation
  
  He believes that the practice of executive compensation is deeply flawed and see that fundamental fixes have to take place in order to have executive compensation that produces outcomes that we would actually want. Much of his advocacy relates to the flawed practices around stock-based compensation.
  
  Corporate Governance
  
  Sadly, Martin believes that our governance systems are not clearly thought through and we expect directors to perform in ways they are unlikely to have the incentives or capabilities to do. His work in this area attempts to go back to first principles to unravel the shortcomings of governance systems and suggest fundamental improvements.
  
  Incentives and Smart Regulation
  
  He writes from time to time on government regulatory strategy. In particular, he is a critic of input regulation, where instead of focusing the regulation on the output we want, we focus on regulating some input, which inadvertently creates incentives that result in us getting the opposite of what we want. For example, Canadian broadcast regulators would like a particular output – more watching of Canadian-made television programs by Canadians. But instead of focusing on regulation that promotes that output, they regulate input – percentage of prime time shows that must be Canadian – and create an incentive to produce lots of crummy Canadian shows that Canadians don't watch.
  
  Human Nature and Incentive Systems
  
  Martin also writes about human nature and how we often fail to understand fundamental aspects of human nature when we design compensation systems. In particular, we over-estimate the power of monetary incentives and under-estimate the power of fear.

• 4. Jurisdictional Competitiveness & Prosperity

  Jurisdictional Competitiveness and Prosperity defines the relationship between the competitiveness of a jurisdiction – whether city-region, state or province, or nation – and the degree to which its inhabitants enjoy high and rising prosperity. Prosperity is a function of the institutions and infrastructures that enable financial, human, knowledge, social and physical assets to be combined so as to produce more valuable outputs than those of competing jurisdictions.
  
  Martin wants to lead the effort to build a better set of theories and models for understanding and producing jurisdictional competitiveness and prosperity. Currently, there is no integrated view as to how a jurisdiction can maximize its competitiveness and prosperity. Their overall goal is to create rigorously- researched and actionable theory on jurisdictional competitiveness and prosperity that can inform policy making around the world. In particular, they want to focus on broad prosperity – that is, the creation of prosperity that is broadly enjoyed by the entire population rather than enjoyed only by the privileged few at the top of the economic food chain.

• 5. Social Innovation

  Social Innovation refers to strategies, concepts or ideas that are aimed at strengthening civil society and making the world in which we live a better place for society broadly. There are many forms of social innovation with many goals. Martin's interest is particularly in two areas of social innovation. The first is the role that corporations can play in being better citizens, showing better stewardship for their world. The second is in the practice of social entrepreneurship— that is, entrepreneurial activities aimed more so at making the world a better place than making the entrepreneur rich.
  
  Martin is devoted to helping those interested in corporate citizenship and social entrepreneurship have better theories and tools with which to shape their actions. He believes that many good-hearted CEOs what like their company to be a better corporate citizen, but lack the tools for doing that. The only tools and techniques they know and are comfortable with are tools designed to help them maximize shareholder value. He believes that if we can provide them with better tools, backed by better theory, they will be empowered to help their companies become better citizens and help make our world a better place.
  
  Martin also believes that social entrepreneurs have the potential to change the world in stunning ways. However, it is a relatively new concept and the field needs building. His devotion is to building the theory of social entrepreneurship and providing insights on successful methods that have the promise of providing assistance to social entrepreneurs around the world.

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