Roger Martin

Roger Martin: Profile

"Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do," Martin says, "we need to understand and emulate how they think." And, if you study them closely, many of today's exceptional leaders -- from AG Lafley of Proctor and Gamble to Meg Whitman of eBay -- practice Martin's form of Integrative Thinking; a big picture approach which takes into account the fact that, at top levels of management, problems rarely fall neatly into segregated categories such as marketing or finance.

Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions. "What are the causal relationships at work here?" "What are the implied trade-offs?" He also presents a model for strengthening your integrative thinking skills of by drawing on different kinds of knowledge, including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, he says, and this talk is the first step in helping audience members master this vital skill.

Martin was named one of the Top Ten Business School Teachers in the World by Business Week. Meanwhile, his book, The Opposable Mind, was named one of the Top Ten Business Books of the Year by The Globe and Mail. Since joining Rotman in 1998, the school has rocketed up worldwide MBA rankings, while never being surpassed. The late Peter Drucker said, "What the Rotman School is doing may be the most important thing happening in management education today." He received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.