Rita McGrath
Columbia University Business School Professor
- C-Suite Strategist
- Thinkers 50 Top 10
- Top 10 Best-Selling Author
- Founder, Valize and Rita McGrath Group
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Rita McGrath's 2025 biography
About Rita McGrath
Rita McGrath, one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation, is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world and has earned the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers 50. She runs the Rita McGrath Group and is the founder of consultancy and innovation platform Valize.
Known as a trusted partner and strategic advisor in the C-suites of many of the country’s biggest and most well-known companies, Rita is the go-to guide for leaders and senior teams, especially as they work to grow, evolve, innovate, and see around corners.
She is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on strategic inflection points, the topic of her most recent book – Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She is the author of 5 books on leadership, business, and organizational management including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Her work on discovery-driven growth was praised by the late legendary management thinker Clayton Christensen as offering “some of the most important tools of management and strategy that have ever been developed.” Additionally, she is currently working on a book full of humor and insight for business leaders aimed at helping organizations become ‘2% less stupid’ by adopting permissionless structures.
The author and host of the popular podcast and newsletter Thought Sparks, Rita also regularly sits down for in-depth conversations with high-level authors and leaders in her Fireside Chats series on Youtube and shares insights across social media platforms, including LinkedIn where she has more than 45,000 followers.
Known for her energy, positivity, storytelling, and ability to connect with audiences, Rita is a sought-after corporate speaker and a long-time professor at Columbia Business School where she leads its popular Executive Education course Leading Strategic Growth and Change, guest-lectures in a number of other courses and is active in a variety of initiatives including the launch of its Think Bigger Innovation Hub. She also acts as faculty director for some of Columbia’s prestigious custom programs offerings, learning experiences designed specifically for individual organizations.
One of the most frequent contributors to the Harvard Business Review, she publishes regularly in other premier journals such as the MIT Sloan Management Review and was awarded the prestigious C. K. Prahalad award from the Strategic Management Society, an award for scholarly impact on practice. She has won many other awards for her work and impact, including the “Theory to Practice” award from the Vienna Strategy Forum, the “Best Paper” award from the Academy of Management Review and multiple “best-book” awards for her work.
A proud graduate of Barnard College (B.A.), the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania (PhD), and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (M.P.A), Rita is also co-leader of the Silicon Guild, a group of thought leaders and best-selling authors who write about trends in business, society, and culture. Connect with her on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Subscribe to her Thought Sparks Newsletter on Substack, listen to her Thought Sparks Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and watch it on YouTube. Learn more about her work at RitaMcGrath.com and Valize.com.
Rita McGrath's 2025 talks & topics
Seeing Around Corners
Strategic Inflection points happen gradually, then suddenly. Armed with the right lenses, you can see them coming.
Snow Melts from the Edges
8 provocative questions to ask senior leaders at risk of being isolated from critical information at the “edges” of their organizations.
Discovery Driven Planning
The revolutionary technique for planning under conditions of high uncertainty that was the basis for the “lean startup” movement.
Creating an Early Warning System
A thought provoking approach to spotting the leading indicators of big changes.
Innovation should not be a mystery
Innovation can be a reliable, repeatable process, but only if you use the right tools.
Manage your portfolio, manage your growth
How to build a portfolio that delivers results today while bullet-proofing your future.
Learning to live with complexity
Complicated systems are predictable. Complex ones aren’t. The two require different approaches.
Failing by Design
How to re-imagine your organization’s view of failure to foster experimentation and learning through “intelligent” failures.
The End of Competitive Advantage & the New Strategy Playbook
Because conventional approaches to strategy no longer work.
3 approaches to creating customer insight
Segmentation, consumption chain analysis and attribute mapping are reliable ways of generating actionable insights.
Speed, stealth and selective attack
Competitive strategies that work against incumbents and that can prompt your competitor to react in ways that suit you.
How to make a rainmaker
It used to be that becoming a trusted advisor was enough to keep and grow clients. No more – meet the “activators” – a new role for business development in professional services firms.
The Permissionless organization
Organizations that can push decision rights to the edges and move fast will always beat bureaucracies that move too slowly.
Positive politics for organizational change
We tend to think of office politics in negative terms. But you can’t avoid politics if you want to create change – welcome to a talk on the power of positive politics.
The transfer of wealth to women: a looming inflection point.
By 2030, $30 trillion in wealth will be in the hands of women. This has huge implications for business, philanthropy and investing – this talk explores some that everyone should be aware of.
It’s not about “fixing” the women – creating gender balanced workplaces
The rise of women to positions of power has been breathtaking. But all too often organizations fail to capitalize on their potential because they apply the wrong mental models – it isn’t about being gender blind, it’s about being gender bilingual.
Creating and communicating your personal vision – how to be seen as strategic.
Women rate well on most leadership characteristics with one exception – they often are not seen as “strategic.” This talk explores where women go wrong and provides remedies.