Episodes
In The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World, Karthik Ramanna provides a framework for leaders to navigate outrage—the intense, polarized reactions to perceived social injustices, political stances, and misaligned corporate actions—by addressing root causes, engaging stakeholders, and building resilience.
Ramanna, a professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, specializes in business-government relations and corporate...
Published 11/12/24
In The Corporate Life Cycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications, Aswath Damodaran presents the corporate life cycle as a universal key for demystifying business finance, strategy and company valuation.
Damodaran is a professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Known as “the Dean of Valuation,” he has published extensively in academic journals, written many books for students and practitioners, and remains the world’s foremost expert on the...
Published 10/29/24
In Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, John Rossman provides a playbook for becoming an innovation and transformation winner.
Rossman was previously an executive at Amazon, responsible for launching their Marketplace business. Now, he is the managing partner of Rossman Partners, advising leading enterprises on large-scale change, and author of the best-selling books The Amazon Way and Think Like Amazon. In his latest book, he examines why...
Published 10/15/24
In Critical Systems Thinking: A Practitioner's Guide, Michael C. Jackson emphasizes the need for integrating diverse systems methodologies to navigate complexity and uncertainty.
Jackson, an emeritus professor of management systems and former dean of the University of Hull Business School, has also served as president of several prominent systems thinking organizations, including the UK Systems Society, the International Federation for Systems Research, and the International Society for the...
Published 10/01/24
There is no shortage of technologists touting the promise of AI, but the frontier of AI fervor is a noted philosopher who thinks the economy could double every few months—and that space colonization by self-replicating machines may not be hundreds of years away.
Enter Nick Bostrom, who previously authored the 2014 bestseller Superintelligence about the dangers of AI, and now considers what can go right with AI in his new book Deep Utopia. Bostrom was formerly a professor at Oxford University,...
Published 09/18/24
In The Great Disconnect: Hopes and Fears After the Excess of Globalization, Marco Magnani explores the factors that are driving the crisis of globalization we are currently experiencing.
Magnani teaches international economics at LUISS University in Rome and Università Cattolica in Milan. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and worked in investment banking for two decades. In his new book, he discusses the history of internationalization and...
Published 09/04/24
In Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future, Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley explore the intangible forces that make it hard to anticipate how new technologies create impact and what we can do about this challenge during the design process for new applications.
Carter is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford – also known as the Stanford d.school. Doorley is a Creative Director at the d.school, having previously worked...
Published 08/06/24
In How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be, Cass Sunstein reveals why some individuals become celebrities—and others don’t.
Sunstein has long been at the forefront of behavioral economics. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. He has authored numerous best sellers, such as Nudge and The...
Published 07/23/24
In The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, Michael Norton explores how the little things we do can create big impact.
Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he also leads the unit for negotiation, organization, and markets. A well known and respected researcher on behavioral economics and well-being, his new book demonstrates the power of small acts—and how a subtle shift of...
Published 07/09/24
In Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times, Rebecca Homkes guides leaders on how to turn uncertainty into opportunity.
Homkes teaches business strategy at the London Business School, is on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education, and consults major companies on strategy. She has developed a framework for leading through uncertainty based on three principles: setting up the firm for continuity through shocks (survive), making strategic choices for growth...
Published 06/25/24
At the BCG Henderson Institute, we aim to bring forward-looking leaders the ideas and inspirations that will shape their next game. To honor this mission—and celebrate the 100th episode of our Thinkers & Ideas podcast—we welcomed three leading futurists to discuss the evolution of business and society.
Rita McGrath is a professor of management at Columbia Business School, and has been ranked among the top 10 management thinkers globally by Thinkers50 for years. Gary Shteyngart, a...
Published 06/11/24
In Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, Cass Sunstein, together with his co-author Tali Sharot, discusses the importance of reevaluating the familiar to discover new insights.
Sunstein has long been at the forefront of behavioral economics. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. He has authored numerous best sellers,...
Published 05/14/24
In Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, Venki Ramakrishnan explores the current research on and prospects for human longevity.
Ramakrishnan leads a group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. For his research on the structure and function of ribosomes, he won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From 2015 to 2020, he served as president of the Royal Society. In his new book, Ramakrishnan explains the mechanisms of aging and their...
Published 04/30/24
In Making Sense of Chaos: A better economics for a better world, J. Doyne Farmer challenges traditional economic models, which rely on simplistic assumptions and fail to provide accurate predictions.
Farmer, a complex systems scientist at the University of Oxford and the Santa Fe Institute, argues that with technological advances in data science and computing, we are now able to apply complex systems thinking to build models that more accurately capture reality and enable us to make better...
Published 04/16/24
In Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick explains how to engage with AI as a co-worker, a co-teacher, and a coach.
Mollick is a professor of management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. In his new book, he discusses the profound impacts AI will have on business and education, using many examples of AI in action. His book challenges us to utilize AI’s enormous power without...
Published 04/02/24
In The Intelligence of Intuition, Gerd Gigerenzer challenges a commonly held view of intuition—namely, that it is somehow inferior to logical rationality.
Gigerenzer is director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and an expert on human decision-making. He argues that intuition is a form of unconscious intelligence shaped experience and...
Published 03/26/24
In Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, Akshat Rathi tells the stories of people around the world who are building impactful solutions to tackle climate change.
Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News, focusing on climate and energy. He also hosts the weekly Zero podcast, in which he talks to the people leading the fight for a zero-emissions future. In his new book, Rathi argues that the best way to cut carbon pollution is by harnessing capitalism. Combating...
Published 03/12/24
In Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito explores the relationship between capitalism and the climate crisis. He argues, controversially, that to have any chance of achieving true sustainability, we must move to a system which deemphasizes growth, adopts different metrics of progress, expands the commons, and places value on goods and services which are not currently considered as part of the economy, like caregiving and nature.
Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the...
Published 02/27/24
In Higher Ground: How Businesses Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, Alison Taylor explores how companies can navigate the complexity of modern business ethics.
Taylor, a clinical associate professor at NYU Stern, has spent decades advising large multinational companies on risk, corruption, sustainability, and organizational culture. In her new book, she combines her experience with vivid case studies to guide companies toward reaching what she describes as the “higher ground”—a...
Published 02/13/24
In The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder, Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao share insights on friction—the forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or even impossible to get things done in organizations.
Sutton is an expert on organizational psychology at Stanford University and a best-selling author. His latest book is a culmination of a seven-year research effort on how effective organizations function without driving employees...
Published 01/30/24
In Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence, along with their coauthors, Gordon Brown and Reid Lidow, consider how we’ve arrived at this state of constant instability and insecurity—and suggest concrete ways to break the cycle.
Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College Cambridge University, was previously the chair of President Obama’s Global Development Council, a Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund, and CEO and co-CIO of...
Published 12/14/23
In The Worlds I See, Dr. Fei-Fei Li provides a personal and deeply insightful depiction of two convergent journeys. One describes her own life and career; Li immigrated to the U.S. from China at age 15, and within a few years had launched into research in computer vision and AI. The other is a history of AI, which has involved many breakthroughs over the past 70 years, culminating in a technology that is now changing life and business.
Li is one of the world’s foremost experts on AI and was...
Published 12/11/23
In his new book The Secret of Culture Change: How To Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization, Jay Bryan Barney discusses why changing company culture is sometimes necessary but always challenging—and how the power of stories can help leaders mobilize their employees around a new strategy.
Jay Barney, a professor of strategic management and the Pierre Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, is one of the world’s...
Published 11/28/23
In The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results, Andrew McAfee describes how a new approach to corporate culture based on science, ownership, speed, and openness, is driving value creation in the 21st century.
McAfee is an expert on how technological progress changes the world, being named to both the Thinkers50 list of top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics. In his new book, he outlines how the giants of Silicon...
Published 11/14/23