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

DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM

I have been interested in the topic of democratic capitalism for three decades. In 1991, I orchestrated a four-way joint venture project between Monitor Company, Michael Porter, the Business Council on National Issues and the Government of Canada on Canadian competitiveness, which produced a landmark study called Canada at the Crossroads: The Reality of a New Competitive Environment. I followed that up by co-authoring Canadian Competitiveness: Ten Years After the Crossroads in 2001.

That same year, I was asked by the Premier of Ontario to Chair the Task Force on the Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress of Ontario. The work of the Task Force was supported by the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity (ICP), which I also Chaired. We studied the factors that helped Ontario’s prosperity move forward, and those that held Ontario back. I chaired the Task Force and ICP for 13 years until 2014. The reports of ICP can be found here.

When I stepped down as Dean of the Rotman School in the summer of 2013, I became the Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI). By this time, I had become highly concerned with the stagnation of middle incomes in America. My view of the promise of democratic capitalism is that it can and should ensure a consistently rising level of prosperity for a broad swath of the citizens of the country. That had happened for 200 years in the world’s leading democratic capitalist country, America, but then stopped. I dedicated six years of work from 2013 to 2019 to understanding how that happened and what to do to return to previous levels of performance. That work is described in greater detail here and was summarized in my 2020 book When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency.

on democratic capitalism

 
Watch "A Plan is Not a Strategy" from Harvard Business Review