Critical to the success of every organization, strategy is not a long planning exercise or document. Strategy can be simple, fun and effective and is founded on a set of five interrelated and powerful choices that positions an organization to win.

ON Strategy

Playing To win
At best, Management Models help managers make better choices faster, without having to go back to first principles to build their decisions from the ground up. However, at their worst, they perpetuate the making of bad decisions. That is why when it comes to Management Models, quality is key.

ON Management Models

A New Way to Think

Integrative thinking is a form of reasoning which allows you to constructively face the tensions of opposing models. Instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, you generate a creative solution. Your solution contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.

ON Integrative Thinking

Creating Great Choices

Organizations need to incorporate the best of design thinking into their ways of working to unleash innovation and creativity. An organization will be able to counter-balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking – to enable it to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. 

ON Design of Business

The Design Of Business

While prevailing theory holds that stock-based compensation perfectly aligns corporate executives’ incentives with those of shareholders, it does the opposite. As a consequence, executives have done brilliantly while shareholders have become increasingly frustrated. Incentives and governance practice needs to be transformed to enable corporations to prosper in a way that better serves society.

ON Incentives & Governance

Fixing the Game

The combination of the stagnation of medium incomes and the rapid rise of high incomes is threatening the future of democratic capitalism. Its predictive future requires building a more robust knowledge, transactional and physical infrastructure for broadly shared prosperity.

ON Democratic Capitalism

When More is Not Better

For both social entrepreneurs and corporations, the key tenet of social innovation is finding ways to make the world a better place. My work focuses on building tools for social entrepreneurs to create more powerful models for creating value for society and developing models to guide corporations on a path of productive corporate citizenship.

ON Social Innovation

Getting Beyond Better

CREATING GREAT CHOICES

Conventional wisdom―and business school curricula―teaches us that making trade-offs is inevitable when it comes to hard choices. But sometimes, accepting the obvious trade-off just isn’t good enough: the choices in front of us don’t get us what we need. In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and better answer. This is integrative thinking.

First introduced by Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and fellow Rotman expert Jennifer Riel vividly show how they have refined and enhanced the understanding and practice of integrative thinking through their work teaching the concept and its principles to business and nonprofit executives, MBA students, even kids. Integrative thinking has been embraced by organizations such as Procter & Gamble, Deloitte, Verizon, and the Toronto District School Board―all seeking a replicable, thoughtful approach to creating a “third and better way” to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade-offs.

The book includes new stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving. It lays out the authors’ practical four-step methodology, which can be applied in virtually any context:

  • Articulating opposing models
  • Examining the models
  • Generating possibilities
  • Assessing prototypes

Stimulating and practical, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

FORMAT: Hardcover 
PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press
PUBLISH DATE: September 19, 2017 
ISBN-10: 1633692965
ISBN-13: 978-1633692961
PAGES: 256

Reviews

Economia
Creating Great Choices 
July-August 2017
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best of lists

Porchlight Books
Business Books to Watch in September 
September 1, 2017
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Videos & Podcasts

2017.09.13---CGC-at-Rotman-EMBA-Launch
Watch "A Plan is Not a Strategy" from Harvard Business Review