Roger Martin’s Required Reading

by Theodore Kinni

strategy+business, October 7, 2015

Prosperity is a theme that runs through Roger Martin’s work in a continuous and unwavering line. Ranked third on the Thinkers50 biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers, Martin has served as a director and cohead of Monitor Company, dean and Premier’s Research Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and, starting in 2013, institute director of the Martin Prosperity Institute. Throughout, he has sought to illuminate the ways and means of economic success for individuals, corporations, and nations.

A prolific writer, Martin has authored numerous books and articles detailing his findings. In The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win through Integrative Thinking,(Harvard Business Review Press, 2007), he explains how the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension can enable leaders to make better decisions and produce superior ideas. In The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2009) and Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (with A.G. Lafley; Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), Martin explains how to enhance corporate success through innovation and strategic thinking.

Finally, in Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011) and, most recently, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works (with Sally R. Osberg; Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), he examines the flaws that are undermining democratic capitalism and the potential of socially responsible business to heal and reinvigorate the system. 

Curious about the underpinnings of his own success, I asked Martin about the books that most influenced him in his professional journey. He offered up the following three titles... read the rest here.