194 Rita McGrath, Professor, Author and Strategy Advisor: Stop Defending The Past - How Leaders Build What Comes Next

Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it.Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and the author of The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners.In this episode, Rita takes me inside her "flops file" ... a collection of corporate disasters so expensive you have to lose fifty million dollars to make the list. We talk about why the old rules of strategy have stopped working, why treating failure as learning is so hard for experienced operators, and how the best leaders manage the one resource they can never get back: their own time and attention.She shares the idea of strategic centering ... working out what your organisation is truly grounded on ... and why a scientist running a science company, or a technologist running a technology company, now has an advantage the generalist CEO does not. And she makes the case that we are living through a genuine turning point, where the old world is fighting to hold its place and the new one is already taking shape for those with the courage to see it.It began with a teenager from Rochester stepping off a plane into a New York City she'd been warned was dangerous ... and choosing curiosity over fear. That instinct became a whole way of thinking about strategy. This is a conversation about paying attention to the future before it arrives. The Unlock Moment is hosted by Dr Gary Crotaz, PhD — master interviewer, executive coach and author. Downloaded in over 140 countries. Sign up to The Unlock Moment newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/ywhdaazp Find out more at https://garycrotaz.com and https://theunlockmoment.com Also discover his other podcasts, The Box of Keys and Unlock Your Leadership. Follow, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts — and connect with Dr Gary on LinkedIn for more leadership insights. Part of The Unlock Moment podcast family.