This article highlights Rita McGrath’s extraordinary career and contributions to management thinking, particularly at the intersection of strategy and innovation. Raised in a science-oriented family, McGrath’s academic journey began with a PhD at Wharton and continued at Columbia Business School. She pioneered concepts like “Discovery-Driven Planning” and the idea of “transient competitive advantage,” reshaping how organisations navigate uncertainty and innovation. Her works, including The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners, blend rigorous research with practical insights. A tireless advocate for diversity in academia, McGrath’s achievements bridge academic excellence and real-world impact, serving as an inspiration for future leaders.

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Prologue

In 2008, after the publication in the Wall Street Journal of a definitive list of top management gurus without a single woman on it, Tom Davenport suggested that correcting this issue would be relatively straightforward. All women had to do was 1) keep at it for a long time; 2) write a huge best-seller; 3) find a regular outlet and publish extensively in it; 4) avoid being a second author; 5) live in the United States; and 6) write about broad, sweeping, preferably intergalactic topics! (Davenport, 2008). Fast forward to today and while there are many more female candidates for guru status, the criteria haven’t changed all that much. In this paper, Rita McGrath and Howard Thomas look at how McGrath pursued this pattern and consider the implications for greater gender diversity in business school education and leadership.

Introduction

Despite her protestations of being way too busy, Howard persuasively talked McGrath into working on this project with the promise that it would be a relatively light effort on her part (and she appreciates his efforts). The result is part biography and part intellectual synthesis of McGrath’s contributions to management thinking at the intersection between strategy and innovation – two fields that spoke relatively little to one another when she first started working in the field.

A curious upbringing

Rita McGrath (nee Gunther) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, where both of her parents were employed at Yale University. Her mother, Helge Liane Gunther was a microbiologist and her father was an organic chemist. Fun fact: her mother’s dissertation and early work was on early discoveries later relevant to understanding self-repairing DNA (Gunther, 1959). At the time (the early 1960s) the very concept was considered so radical by the orthodoxy that she wasn’t allowed to publish some of her work for fear it would threaten grant funding. Fast forward 50 years and the 2015 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for the discovery of how cells repair themselves. Of course, there were a good many researchers involved beyond the three that were eventually recognised by the Nobel committee, but that’s always been a fun little reality (Hanawalt, 2013).

The house was full of books, and any family argument involving facts was usually resolved by turning to one or another of them. Scientific curiosity was an everyday reality in their home. The family moved to a suburb of Rochester, New York in the late 60s, where her father took a role at the Google of its day, Xerox, at a time when the company could do no wrong. McGrath adored New York City and moved there to attend Barnard College (the women’s undergraduate affiliate of Columbia University) in 1977. She wanted to study history, which precipitated endless envelopes of newspaper clippings outlining the careers of history majors gone horribly wrong from her parents.

They compromised on political science. She graduated magna cum laude in 1981 with a BA in political science and membership in the honorary society, Phi Beta Kappa. She then continued her academic study at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University from which she graduated with the degree of Master of Public Administration, MPA, in 1982.

After internships with the City Council President’s office, the Parks Department, and an agency called the Department of General Services, she accepted a full-time job with the City of New York, initially as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Commissioner. This eventually led to a role leading the user side of a “computerisation” (as it was called then) project in the City’s procurement area. It was a major undertaking, as the City’s procurement volumes exceed the budgets of over 30 states! The project led to her continuing lifetime interest in systems and processes which facilitated large scale organisational change. She also started a few personal entrepreneurial businesses in political consulting and a ‘Kinko’s’ type operation called ‘Unworried Words.’

 Transition to Academia

Against the backdrop of the explosion of interest in business schoosl in the 1980s and a shortage of PhD trained instructors, she decided to pursue a PhD in strategic management. She joined the Social Systems Sciences (‘Triple S’) Department of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1988. This group was founded by legendary management thinker Russell Ackoff, with the objective of teaching MBA and encouraging other students to think in terms of systems and how complex adaptive systems operate (McGrath, 2009). Unfortunately, Ackoff had had one too many run-ins with the more traditional decision-makers at the school and departed Wharton in 1986 to form INTERACT, a consulting firm that ironically provided the kind of comprehensive and systematic training business schools are now being encouraged to develop for their students.

Thankfully, the school had been successful in recruiting Ian C. MacMillan (Mac), who joined Wharton that year. He together with Ed Moldt, a practitioner and serial entrepreneur were tasked by the dean, Russ Palmer, with building up the entrepreneurship curriculum at Wharton (McGrath, 2014). MacMillan was a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Centre. McGrath, and several other members of her PhD cohort joined the research programme at the Snider Centre.

McGrath’s original idea for her thesis was to study the ‘science of implementation’. Mac said he couldn’t think of anything more boring than studying the science of implementation. In a lucky break, Ira Rimerman, a Senior Vice President at Citibank had a deep curiosity about why Citi’s new ventures sometimes produced tremendous success (telephone banking, personal credit cards and ATMs for example) and sometimes dreadful failures (a Point of Sale venture years before its time, a nearly catastrophic foray into international real estate and television banking, for example). He offered the Snider Center funding for a 3-year grant to produce case studies of the bank’s efforts at creating new businesses within the firm. “No holds barred,” he encouraged, “let’s get to the bottom of what’s necessary for the venturing process to work and drive growth in a substantive way.” McGrath was the director of that project. Out of that research came several papers, but more importantly for McGrath, a profound fascination with the human context in which innovation and growth happen (or don’t) (McGrath, 1995; McGrath, 2006).

The ‘Citiventures’ programme as it came to be called, was pivotal for understanding and extending the process of corporate venturing, which was a bit of a niche subject within strategy. Building on the seminal frameworks created by Robert Burgelman, McGrath’s early work on venturing focused on the individual characters involved in the process, but more importantly on the systems that allowed ventures to flourish or (far more commonly) to flounder (Burgelman, 1983a; 1983b).

Her dissertation was an unusual longitudinal study of how existing firms learn to create new competences, which she identified as a cumulative process of learning, team building, competence creation and ultimately, of establishing a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

While at Wharton, McGrath was also part of a collaboration focused on cross-cultural entrepreneurship involving partnerships with several different schools, many associated with Mac and Sue Birley’s Global Entrepreneurship Conference. The idea was to have each school administer survey instruments to entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs in their local geographies with the promise that the resulting data sets could be parsed for a broad cross-cultural understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour. This eventually evolved to become the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor programme (Monitor”, 2024). Papers from that period included a study that showed that Taiwanese entrepreneurs were more similar to US-based entrepreneurs than to Chinese entrepreneurs, making the case that entrepreneurial culture could change as policies shifted (McGrath, MacMillan and Scheinberg, 1992; McGrath, MacMillan, Yang and Tsai, 1992).

Transition to Columbia

In what can only be described as an unconventional job search (she gave only one job talk), McGrath was recruited by Columbia Business School to join their strategy department as an Assistant Professor. At the time, the department, though small, featured incredibly strong scholars such as Don Hambrick, Michael Tushman, Ming-Jer Chen and Kathy Rudie Harrigan. Interestingly, many of these scholars emphasised not only building theory but also having an impact on practice (Hambrick, 2007). In 1998 she was promoted to an Associate Professorship at Columbia.

It was during this 1993-8 period that I (Howard) first met McGrath at the Strategic Management Society (SMS) and Academy of Management (AOM) meetings when I was dean at the College of Business at Illinois. Since then, I have noted and admired her significant academic and professional career accomplishments. This is discussed in the following sections which cover the periods 1993-2000, 2000-2010, 2010-2015, and 2015-present.

Note that the choice of these periods is for chronological convenience. In each of these four periods McGrath has built a range of intellectual frameworks and professional pathways which demonstrate both outstanding scholarship and very clear leadership for professionals and practitioners in the strategy field. A final concluding section contains reflections on her career.

1993-2000: EXAMINING THE EMERGING INTERSECTION OF STRATEGY AND INNOVATION

The field of strategic management, heavily influenced by fields such as industrial economics, historically had the most to say under two conditions. The first was that a construct that could reasonably be called an ‘industry’ existed. The second was that equilibrium was the norm, perhaps punctuated now and again by change, but that the standard state of things held still long enough that strategy scholars could examine them. Michael Porter, Igor Ansoff, Dan Schendel and, of course, Russell Ackoff were hugely influential in building the initial set of ideas and frameworks used in strategic analysis, joined as well by influential consultants such as Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group (Ackoff, 1981; Ansoff, 1965; Henderson, 1980; Porter, 1980; Schendel and Hofer, 1979). As a course taught in business schools, strategy initially focused mainly on the problems facing general managers and people in the field were mainly concerned with teaching.

Strategy as a more academic research field was formalised and popularised by academics such as Michael Porter and consultants such as Bruce Henderson, Bill Bain and Frederick Gluck (of BCG, Bain and McKinsey, respectively) (Kiechel, 2010). The Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy of Management was only formed in 1971, but by 1990 had captured about a third of the Academy’s membership (Hambrick and Chen, 2008). The ‘positioning’ school of strategy was the dominant idea in its earliest days. Among its assumptions was the idea that relatively few strategies were available to firms, that the best position was amenable to analytical understanding and that the role of top managers was mostly to make choices regarding competition with other firms selling similar products and services to the ones being analysed. The goal, if possible, was to establish a sustainable competitive advantage, protected by powerful barriers to entry by would-be competitors.

Against this backdrop and right around the time McGrath’s career was starting, was a different group of scholars, among them David Teece, Birger Wernerfelt, Jay Barney, Rebecca Henderson, and Gary Pisano who drew their inspiration from the work of Edith Penrose on the theory of the growth of the firm (Barney, 1991; Henderson and Cockburn, 1994; Penrose, 1995; Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997; Wernerfelt, 1984).

Penrose differed from most economists of her generation, insisting that firms have ‘insides’ and that decisions made by entrepreneurial managers mattered. In her view, the process of growth was through path-dependent learning which meant that unlike the analytically similar firms of the positioning school, Penrosian firms were all endowed with unique resources (or ‘services’ as she sometimes called them). This in turn meant that a firm could create competitive advantages which would be difficult for other firms to copy given their inability to replicate the same learning journey. The emergence of the so-called ‘resource-based’ view of the firm found that strategies could be constructed around specific resources (also called ‘routines’ by Nelson and Winter) specific to a given firm (Nelson and Winter, 1982). Penrose’s perspective, for McGrath, was much more compelling, given her own experiences managing large groups of people within organisations and seeing the impact of managerial decisions on organisational outcomes (McGrath, 2001; McGrath, MacMillan and Tushman, 1992).

Her dissertation was very much based on the resource-based view. She argued that firms develop new competencies through a team-based, interactive learning process, and that, moreover, the progress of this process could be observed and measured. While Penrose based much of her research on in-depth observations of how firms grew (with the key hero in her stories being entrepreneurial middle managers), McGrath used team-based surveys collected over time to assess the state of the art in new capability creation. In a methodological difference from the way many surveys are conducted, her ‘dependent variable’ was obtained not from the same surveys respondents used to generate the independent variables, but from different respondents in other parts of the organisation who had enough knowledge of projects to weigh in on their results. The empirical demonstration of a fine-grained capability creation process was considered sufficiently compelling that it was published in major journals (McGrath, 1993; McGrath, MacMillan and Venkataraman, 1995; McGrath, Tsai, Venkataraman and MacMillan, 1996).

McGrath also explored a more traditional theme in strategy, that of competitive moves and counter-moves. Her and her co-author’s twist on this was that sometimes firms could make moves that would cause their rivals to divert resources from their most optimal use in ways that the initiating firm could benefit from (McGrath, Chen and MacMillan, 1998).

Discovery-driven Planning, the Flops File and the Entrepreneurial Mindset

In parallel with her ongoing work in what can be thought of as more mainstream strategic management research, McGrath was also examining the entrepreneurship and innovation process. Among the more fun explorations was a stream of research that continues to this day – research into corporate ‘flops’ – the big ones. Not the simple little experiments gone awry but the massive corporate investments in ventures that soaked up tens of millions of dollars, blew up careers and sometimes brought down entire companies. Euro-Disney, TV Cable Week, Parfum Bic, Consors, Bebo, Pets.com – you get the idea.

As McGrath looked through the numerous cases (she eventually had to establish a loss of at least $50 million to merit membership in the flops file), what she realised was that every single one of these ventures had been planned (and funded) as though their parent companies knew what they were doing. In reality, most of what they were working on were sometimes quite heroic assumptions about markets and consumer behaviour. Out of this research, in 1995, came her landmark Harvard Business Review article, co-authored with Mac, ‘Discovery Driven Planning’. Coincidentally, Joe Bower and Clayton Christensen’s ‘Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave’ was also published that same year (Bower and Christensen, 1995; McGrath and MacMillan, 1995).

Discovery-driven planning would go on to be a major building block for what we think of today as best practices in creating new ventures, credited by famed entrepreneur Steve Blank as part of the ‘lean startup’ concept (Blank, 2013). Disruption, of course, became a household word among corporate leaders and everyday executives as it highlighted how seemingly sensible management behaviour (such as listening to your best customers) can lead a firm to ruin. McGrath and Clay became good friends in this period and often referenced each other’s work (Christensen, 1997; Christensen and Raynor, 2003).

McGrath and Mac were invited by the Harvard Business School Press to write the book that became The Entrepreneurial Mindset. This was in the frothy 90s, when all you had to say was ‘business model’ and venture capitalists would throw funding at new ventures. McGrath and Mac were more focused on the strategies firms employed to consistently get into new spaces and hoped to call the book ‘Discovery-driven Strategy.’ Unfortunately, they were overruled by their editor who favoured the entrepreneurial title in the context of the dot.com boom era. This led to two problems – nobody wanted to touch a book with entrepreneurship in the title after the catastrophic losses of the crash. Further, nobody understood (at that time) that entrepreneurial behaviour was going to be essential to the longevity of any firm as the pace of competition became faster, so the book was stocked in the small business sections of most stores. Hint: This is how not to sell a book.

Nevertheless, Mac and McGrath were clear that companies were in a world of fast-paced competition – some called it hyper-competition – in the 1990s where the duration of any competitive advantage was getting shorter (D’Aveni, Dagnino and Smith, 2010; D’Aveni and Gunther, 1994). Consequently, they argued that businesses would need to generate sets of potential new advantages and business models based on creating new business ideas and innovations. They believed that companies should take heed of lessons learned from habitual entrepreneurs about how to start multiple businesses successfully. It helped that both Mac and McGrath had entrepreneurial backgrounds and experiences – Mac, for example, had been a partner in a successful global travel business. Their aim was to integrate theories of strategic management with theoretical insights from entrepreneurship, innovation and risk uncertainty models to provide alternative frameworks for energising strategic growth and change in a much wider range of potential new competitive ‘arenas’ (or spaces).

The basic elements of their model are:

• Leading with an entrepreneurial frame that defines objectives and sources of new competitive arenas (not limited to existing industries or markets)
• Identifying an opportunity register of new ideas that might involve existing product redesigns, new product differentiators with associated reconfigurations of existing segments, and leveraging new product ideas
• Building new ideas and approaches into a viable portfolio of businesses and strategic options
• Designing an entrepreneurial, innovative climate for strategic execution that creates viable growth options involving disruptive technologies

What is extremely interesting in the period is the high quality of academic publications produced by McGrath in relation to each of the key themes in the entrepreneurial mindset book.

McGrath was particularly influential in making the case for why firms should adopt a ‘real options’ approach to investing in new areas. Unlike traditional valuation approaches such as the net present value rule, or even stage-gate processes, by taking an options approach firms could potentially access the upside of new opportunities while knowing at any given point in time exactly the cost and risk of their efforts. This approach exactly matches the idea from discovery-driven planning of breaking monolithic design processes for new ventures into a series of key checkpoints. Because one always has the right to stop investing in an option, the cost and risk can be contained at the same time the upside value of an option can be maintained (McGrath, 2023).

In order to capitalise on strategic growth options, McGrath and MacMillan advocate the use of real options reasoning processes, involving careful appraisal of growth value and realistic evaluation of cost constraints. Further assessments of the strengths of the firm’s culture, dynamic capabilities and competencies must be balanced against impacts of potential technological and market-based uncertainty profiles in judging and determining the final, overall strategic options portfolio. Her paper on failure and the entrepreneurial process won the ‘best paper’ award from the Academy of Management Review in 1999, and her 1997 paper has been widely cited as forming a core reference for subsequent research in real options (McGrath, 1997; 1999).

By any standards, this is an enviable record. It is even more noteworthy that she produced impactful and high-quality papers for both academics and practitioners. It characterises her work on both theory and practice and is exemplified in the preface of the entrepreneurial mindset book (pp xiii-xiv) where she simply and eloquently explains her integrative approach to what she calls “strategic management under uncertainty.” Hence, in this period, she established a growing reputation as an excellent business school researcher as well as having meaningful and practical impact for the broader professional management audience.

2000-2010: INTEGRATING ACADEMIC AND PRACTITIONER PERSPECTIVES – MARKETBUSTING AND DISCOVERY DRIVEN GROWTH

Many of McGrath’s writings in this period were based upon studies of successful growth strategies achieved by a range of established companies in several industry sectors and contexts ranging from relatively low-risk, incremental strategic changes to much higher-risk, often disruptive changes. This culminated in the publication of books on Market-Busting strategies (McGrath and MacMillan, 2005a; 2005b) and Discovery-driven Growth (McGrath and MacMillan, 2009). In this extensive, wide-ranging study, the research design examined each firm’s breakthrough competencies, opportunity portfolios, and potential competitive arenas in which they chose to operate. The research then addressed the issue of how and why each chose to focus on its particular set of strategic options given perceived resource and risk constraints, e.g. the extent of both market and technological uncertainty embedded in and associated with each potential option.

The discovery-driven growth (DDG) planning model is illustrated clearly in a range of examples including Cemex, in the ready-mixed cement environment and Swiss Reinsurance in the insurance industry. Indeed, the DDG model typically involves three main elements.

• First, creating a focus on a calculated growth strategy linking a well-reasoned, financial resource allocation process with specific, well-analysed growth opportunities
• Second, executing strategic growth projects well by ‘learning by doing’ and managing flexibly in an adaptive fashion as these projects, if successful, should define the firm’s long-term growth pathway
• Third, weaving all the elements of a DDG strategy into the firm’s ongoing, evolutionary culture and willingness to embrace fast-paced organisational change.

Even when producing two very well-written strategic growth books, McGrath continued to publish in academic and more applied practitioner journals, specifying elements of discovery-driven growth processes in theory and practice.

Together with John Child, McGrath co-edited a special edition of the Academy of Management Journal, with the mandate to look at how new information technologies were affecting organisational forms. (Child and McGrath, 2001). That work was among the earliest to lay out the case that digital technologies were likely to shift organisations more toward market forms of organising, with access to assets rather than ownership of them now becoming cost-effective and technically feasible. She subsequently revisited that theme in her well-regarded bestseller Seeing Around Corners (McGrath, 2019).

For another special issue on the future of management, McGrath made suggestions on how management as a field could come into its own, emphasising more interaction and collaborative learning with practitioners (McGrath, 2007).

She also continued her work examining real options theory in several different contexts. In McGrath and Nerkar, she and her collaborator explored how pharmaceutical firms’ investment strategies empirically correlate with the predictions that options theory might suggest – investing to open new opportunities, killing off those without promise and doubling down on those that looked as though they could gain traction. (McGrath and Nerkar, 2004). Options, she further argued, could be valuable vehicles for exploring new firm trajectories, consistent with the Penrosian approach she took in her dissertation (McGrath, Ferrier and Mendelow, 2004). In a paper combining her interest in learning from failure and options, she examined how companies that maintain a healthy programme of stopping ventures but also learning from them can create value even when a programme does not go forward (Keil, McGrath and Tukiainen, 2009). On the practitioner front, a paper by McGrath and MacMillan (2002) won the Maurice Holland Best Paper Prize from the Industrial Research Institute. Another examined how options could be used in highly uncertain technological environments (MacMillan, Putten, McGrath and Thompson, 2006).

Two of her practitioner papers (McGrath, Keil and Tukiainen, 2006) and (McGrath and Keil, 2007) continued the theme of learning from failed ventures, with a practitioner twist.

The Great Recession of 2008 prompted many requests for McGrath’s insights on how companies might survive and recover. Several relevant articles had to do with the challenge of designing robust business models after a global calamity that revealed just how fragile the interconnections between ecosystems could be (Cliffe, 2011; McGrath, 2010), and how complex systems introduce new kinds of systemic risk. As she said, “where is Einstein when you really need him?”(Sargut and McGrath, 2010). She also continued with a stream of both academic and consulting work looking at resource diversion tactics in competitive dynamics (MacMillan, Van Putten and McGrath, 2003).

In summary, the 2000-2010 period shows how McGrath used the three vehicles of books, academic publications, and particularly readable, practitioner-oriented journals to spread ideas of entrepreneurial mindsets, discovery-driven planning under complexity and uncertainty, and real options reasoning across the widest possible management audience. McGrath and McMillan clearly wanted to make even greater impact on management and its applications.

2010-2015: THE END OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: HOW TO KEEP YOUR STRATEGY MOVING AS FAST AS YOUR BUSINESS

McGrath’s increasingly high profile and growing body of work led to her being elected as a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society in 2011. This is the leading academic research association in the field of strategy. The award of this fellowship was a clear recognition by peers in the field of her significant scholarly impact. She first appeared on the Thinkers50 list of recognised global thinkers in 2011, was listed in their top 10 thinkers in 2013, and has remained in the top ten every year that the rankings have been awarded since.

In essence, McGrath had become not only a thought leader, and an idea generator, but also a great communicator of management ideas and innovations to both academics and practitioners in business, government and society. She is an acknowledged expert in both theory and practice.

Over this period, she wrote her fourth book. This was her first sole-authored book (much to Mac’s objections), namely ‘The End of Competitive Advantage’ (McGrath, 2013a). This comprehensive and well-written book won the Strategy and Business ‘Best Book’ award in 2013 and was also short-listed for the Financial Times Best Book award. This book captures her vision of strategy as a dynamic discipline in tackling increasingly turbulent, fast-paced and volatile economic and social environments where competitive advantages are of short duration. It convincingly attempts to link theories and concepts drawn from entrepreneurship, innovation and growth dilemmas with evolving theories of strategy associated with linking strategic resources, dynamic capabilities and competitive strategies. She advocates the use of approaches such as real options thinking and other decision-making models in attacking increasingly risky, uncertain environments successfully. She sees a pathway of ideas drawn from entrepreneurial mindsets (e.g. ‘learning from failure’) and disruptive innovations (as described by Clay Christensen and Joseph Schumpeter) as the ‘seed corn’ for creating entrepreneurial and innovation frameworks to address problems associated with strategic growth and transient competitive advantage. Her notions of discovery-driven growth and planning platforms provide guidance for further research in the strategy field.

McGrath found that, just as Davenport had predicted, authoring on her own without a male co-author gained her much more individual recognition and visibility. This is entirely consistent with research by Sarsons et al, who found that: “the results are most consistent with a story of women receiving less credit for their joint work with men rather than a story of women contributing less when they work with men. We assume that tenure committees begin with the prior that women are on average of lower ability than men and that solo-authored papers provide a clear signal of one’s ability whereas coauthored papers provide an unclear signal. Employers then misattribute credit for work produced by a man and a woman, as the man is assumed to be of higher ability.” (Sarsons, Gërxhani, Reuben and Schram, 2021). In other words, women consistently pay a ‘co-author’ penalty when they co-author with a man. That is certainly consistent with McGrath’s experience.

By this stage of McGrath’s career, demand for and a return to her practitioner-oriented work, together with her desire to have more of an impact on practice led her to do more that might attract managerial attention. The theme of transient advantage and the associated new playbook for strategy were laid out in several articles (Leavy, 2014; McGrath, 2013b). Together with this theme are those of business model innovation, dealing with complexity, and learning to fail well (Cliffe, 2011; McGrath, 2011; Sargut and McGrath, 2011).

A particularly interesting study that McGrath undertook had to do with how difficult it is to sustain growth, even at relatively low levels. In her study of growth outliers’, she took every publicly traded firm with a market capitalization of over $1 billion and looked at how many grew their top lines successfully over a 10-year period. It turns out that out of some 7,000 firms that fit the definition, only 10 were able to accomplish this. Her conclusion was that these firms were able to combine coherence and stability in their strategies, leadership and core values with incredible dynamism in their approaches to resource allocation, personnel rotation and experimentation (McGrath, 2012).

On the more academic side, she authored a retrospective of Mac’s career and impact on the field of entrepreneurship and how he paved the way for many younger scholars to follow (McGrath, 2014). She continued her resource diversion look at competitive dynamics, this time examining how firms respond to hostile takeover threats (Keil, Laamanen and McGrath, 2013).

2015-present: SEEING AROUND CORNERS: HERE’S HOW TO SEE INFLECTION POINTS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN TO GIVE YOU A STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE

This is the period in which McGrath becomes even more focused on applications and strategic consulting in the areas of strategic growth and change (the clear focus of her award-winning executive programme on leading change at Columbia Business School).

Her book on ‘Seeing Around Corners’ (2019) and the late Clay Christensen’s foreword (in spring of 2019) to the book, captures the essence of McGrath’s journey. An extended quote(s) from that foreword follows:

He (Christensen) starts by indicating that both he and McGrath, completed their dissertations in the late 1990s – the era of digital transformation in which the consequences of digital transformation “were only dimly anticipated.”

“Both of us intuited that the theories of success at the time (in the 1990s) were on the brink of major challenge. In my case, the big idea was that assumptions about ‘good management’ would lead to corporate disaster as faced by what I came to call the ‘innovator’s dilemma’. In her (McGrath’s) case, the big idea was that approaching highly uncertain projects as though they were business as usual was a trap. Both articles were published in the HBR of 1995 (McGrath’s was a joint paper with Ian MacMillan on ‘Discovery-driven planning’).

We were challenging orthodoxy – in fact, we are still challenging orthodoxy.”

Christensen continues, and, towards the end of his foreword, states the following:

“Rita McGrath basically rips apart decades of strategic thinking in which you are in an industry which determines your fate. Thinking in terms of an arena rather than an industry, McGrath suggests that means that markets are no longer defined by product category but rather by the jobs that people have to get done in their lives. This concept offers a much more powerful categorisation scheme for navigating disruptive change.”

“She then goes a step further to illuminate not just the what but the how of successful innovation. Her theory of discovery-driven planning helps managers discover the future while simultaneously discovering risk.”

Using this excellent foreword as a guideline it is clear that the purpose of the ‘seeing around corners’ book is to enable researchers to address potential inflection points to better understand which innovations will bring value to firms in the future.

In that book, McGrath gives an example of how firms must address even weak signals (or early warning systems) of possible inflection points and contemplate future scenarios as quickly and effectively as possible. The great insight behind that book is that while inflection points feel as though they came out of nowhere, they have usually been underway for quite some time.

McGrath’s profile as a leading academic scholar and award-winning teacher has now allowed her to embrace an even wider range of activities as a keynote speaker and a trusted advisor and consultant to many business and governmental organisations. Her important role as a successful professor in Columbia Business School allowed her to develop a range of executive courses including ‘Leading Organisational Growth and Change’ and a number of custom-designed programmes for specific companies.

She speaks at conferences, such as the notable Drucker Global Forum (sponsored in part by EFMD) and a range of forums for the Strategic Management Society and other professional organisations which have reinforced her reputation as an expert in the strategic management field.

McGrath has also devoted considerable time since the 2000s to writing and distributing regular blogs (which she calls ‘Thought Sparks’) which are distributed gratis through her RMG website (since the 2000s). To date, she and her colleagues have written around 200-300 ‘Thought Sparks’ which report in an engaging, insightful and readable style new ideas, controversies and examples of strategic growth innovation and discovery in practical contexts.

One other important area of McGrath’s activities is her hosting of webinars called ‘Fireside Chats’ with insightful academics and authors such as Amy Edmondson (Harvard), Deborah Ancona (MIT) and Ron Adner (Dartmouth). These are subsequently posted as YouTube videos alongside McGrath’s own videos of her keynote speeches and topic seminars given for professional audiences (including Columbia Business School). To date, over 500 videos have been posted on YouTube.

More recently, McGrath has set up a cognate company, Valize LLC., whose aim is to build a software-based (so-called SPARC hub) vehicle and innovation platform to enable organisations to identify sustainable innovation capabilities. This is a natural extension of McGrath’s work on discovery-driven growth and planning.

In recognition of her lifetime achievement, and unique perspectives, McGrath was awarded the C K Distinguished Practitioner Scholar award by SMS and recognised as #1 in strategy by Thinkers50. Both are high-profile awards that attest to her great abilities as an outstanding scholar and management expert.

As to what is next for McGrath, there is a new book in the works about ‘permissionless’ organisational designs and how they can further help companies integrate strategy and innovation into their day-to-day operations. 

Reflections on McGrath’s journey

The guru game has certainly changed since Davenport’s publication of the all-male management guru list in 2008. McGrath’s good friend Amy Edmondson has been #1 on the Thinkers50 list for two editions now. The 2023 list had 6 women (including McGrath) in the top ten, and a far more diverse representation of management thinking throughout. Business school faculty have become more gender-balanced, although of course there is still a long way to go. As to what her story might mean for others, here are some reflections.

Big transitions, such as giving up a job and a place you love, are hard. That first year at Wharton, McGrath recalls reading (and re-reading) a paper by John Child about the importance of strategic choice. Having just been through close to a decade of managing big teams and driving big changes, it seemed pretty obvious to her that strategic choice mattered, but that was missing the point, which was to counter the thesis popular at the time that organisations couldn’t change and managers didn’t really matter. It’s important to remember that the purpose of the PhD is to provide the context for research contributions and the discipline of understanding theories, boundary conditions and causation. That doesn’t come easily at first but it will get better as you gain mastery (Child, 1972). As a professor told her, “Learn to read like a graduate student.”

It’s a good idea to be committed to your goals, but flexible about the approach to get there. It is incredibly easy to let success standards that are relevant for other people dictate what you seek to accomplish. Scoring high on rankings, getting into prestigious journals and getting tenure are the outcomes of hard work, good choices and some luck (as Ron Adner would say, if you have the option of choosing luck vs. strategy, choose luck!). These things are all lagging indicators of being willing to be a bit ahead of the curve in your work.

There is absolutely no substitute for a strong network of supportive colleagues. At Wharton, Ian MacMillan and S. Venkatraman as well as Ned Bowman, Hitendra Singh, George Day and Harbir Singh were tough but fair taskmasters on her dissertation committee. At Columbia, McGrath found constructively competitive but supportive colleagues and co-authors. Mac certainly provided mentorship, sponsorship and guidance in a major way.

It’s also worth building optionality into your career. The rules of the road for business academia are still largely based on a model set in motion and encouraged by the Ford Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. The Foundation sought to apply academic rigour to business research, forcing it into an academically and discipline-based orientation (Khurana, Kimura and Fourcade, 2011). Many academics are critical of the resulting incentive structures (Bettis, 2012; Hambrick, 2007; Harmon, 2006). We are seeing trends such as a drop in applications, greater utilisation of non-tenured, even non-PhD holding faculty and innovations in building curricula that make the taken-for-granted career path many business academics have been on less certain (Council”, 2024).

As to the future of strategy, innovation and the functions of business education, we are still far from embracing Russ Ackoff’s ideas in designing curricula that emphasise systems thinking, holistic problem solving and multi-disciplinary perspectives. If we are, as McGrath believes, in the midst of a great transformation from the societal designs of the post-World War II convention to those that are yet to be created, these approaches will be essential. Indeed, as Carlota Perez warns us, if we don’t get smarter about understanding how to design a capitalist system that works for most people, we are likely to miss out on what could be a new golden age (Perez, 2002).

A last word from Howard

From my perspective, there is only one RMG – she has a unique engaging style and immense intellectual curiosity. She is an inspiration to students, colleagues and the practitioner community: she possesses a relentless drive, energy and enthusiasm for her professional work and also her role in academic and broader society (for example, she serves on the board of a regional theatre in her area).

Finally, it is also clear that her family (her husband, son and daughter, as well as her parents) have provided a sense of joy and contentment in her life. This is very clear from the unique acknowledgements and thanks she addresses sincerely to her family in every one of the five books that she has written.

She is also a passionate advocate for meaningful, impactful change in both management education and its societal impact. I fully expect her to continue with her unique qualities of drive, intellectual curiosity and novel insights in the future – she is a strong role model for those who believe in the value of education and the importance of EDIR (equality, diversity, inclusion, respect) principles as societies change and grow.

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