Roger Martin

Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

What Would The NFL Do?

Reality, according to C.S. Lewis, is usually something you could not have guessed.
 
Roger Martin couldn’t agree more. Reality, after all, is only a construction of our own inferences and interpretations. Martin spends an enormous amount of time trying to convince business leaders to challenge the realities before them, to consider alternatives, and to entertain the very real possibility that things could be other than they appear at the moment.
 
As the dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, author of four books on business innovation, and a prolific writer in the business media, Martin is a straight-shooting and respected voice in the field. He’s also a leading proponent of design thinking and his latest book, The Design of Business, shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, and RIM are using the approach to innovate and win.
 
Football analogies frequently spice up his arguments. “The point spread in football is the moral equivalent of a stock price in business,” he says. Recalling older CEO’s to revive a dying enterprise is like the Jets signing Brett Favre. If you want him to do his old tricks, it might work. But if you want him to do new tricks, try the rookie.
 
Martin writes in such animated terms on a wide range of business topics. Just don’t get him started on CEO compensation. (Greed may be good in Gordon Gekko’s world, but to Martin, shame generates a more ethical return on investment.) He sees things in simple terms: good people fix problems, bad people create them. The critical task of the manager is to be eternally vigilant about weeding out the bad people (“useless baggage”), while showering the good people with affection. He is a huge believer in the power of “subjective well-being” (i.e., happiness) as a positive motivating force.
 
Martin’s way of thinking is a stumbling block for many—especially for analytically-geared business minds that prefer probabilities over possibilities, statistics over instincts and algorithms over mysteries.
Purely analytical thinking is great, he says, if we apply it to things that can never be other than they are. A rock is a rock. Aristotelian analysis will help us to prove this fact, but it also leads inevitably to “either-or” dichotomies that drag on the creative impulse, squeezing out the possibility of finding a third (or fourth or fifth…) solution to a problem.
 
“As long as we apply analytical thinking to things that can be other than they are, we will convince ourselves that what we have now is 'reality,' and we will be both blissfully ignorant of the possibilities that could be and comforted that there is nothing to do but accept the situation,” says Martin.
 
A business situation can be many things, depending on one’s perspective. And despite our best efforts to predict future results, consumers often act in irrational ways. Martin blames the two market crashes of the past decade on “well-intentioned” management theories taught in every business school and entrenched in every publicly-traded corporation. Today’s managers, he says, reduce the whole of business to a science run by sophisticated software that fails to account for the whims of the marketplace.
 
While Martin respects the need for scientific management to run increasingly larger organizations, he also regrets the waning of gut instinct and improvisation that make great business leaders great.
 
“Cycles of advantage are shortening,” he points out. “If you have an idea, and you get it out into the marketplace, you can’t expect it to have advantage for as long as you could in 1981. What that means is more fundamental and profound decisions for corporations more often. What are we going to do next and next and next?—as opposed to, Man, we have a great hit and we’ll just ride that baby for 20 years.”
 
To compete at the highest levels, all businesses need a mechanism for creating new models, Martin says. His advice: Don’t get too cozy. Keep experimenting, Keep testing your own thinking. Do something that you don’t understand and “keep nurturing that spark of originality.”
The reality you could not have guessed will not be far behind.
 
www.rotman.utoronto.ca/