Roger Martin
Professor Emeritus, Rotman School of Management · 1 appearance on the record.
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Roger Martin served as Dean of the Rotman School of Management from 1998 to 2013 and has advised CEOs at corporations including Procter & Gamble, Ford, and Lego. He is known for pioneering concepts in integrative thinking and co-authoring the strategy book Playing to Win.
31statements → 3claims → 0claims resolved → 3.9/5average certainty → 2.61/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 2said about them ↓
3 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 2 assertions · 6 opinions · 22 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Roger argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Roger Martin on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Roger Martin said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Martin: Modern US capital markets harm American competitiveness
“I think in 2020, now America has got a capital market that is a detriment to American competitiveness because it is causing companies to behave in ways that aren't good for the company, its employees, America over overall.”
Roger Martin: The era of widely held public corporations will end
“I think we're going to look back, twenty-fifty, we'll look back on this period, 19, 40 ish, 35, 40 ish to say 20, 20, 25 or 30 as this insane period where we thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form. And we're going to look back…”
Martin: Public Company Boards Disciplining Management Is an Absolute Fantasy
“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”
Roger Martin: Rating agency analysts are inherently worse at assessing bonds than market traders
“The only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds, right? Because if they had a skillset that made them good at rating bonds, what chair would they be sitting in? ... They'd be either sitting in a chair at Goldma…”
Roger Martin: Business dramatically and vastly overuses the scientific method
“We dramatically, vastly overuse science.”
Roger Martin: Creative domains require creating causes, not analyzing past data
“Analyze data, collect as much data, analyze it rigorously to determine causes of effects in this other part of the world. Imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made. And he said, the job of human beings in that …”
Roger Martin: Motivations like pay and prestige undermine corporate board effectiveness
“I think the only useful reason for wanting to be on a board is is that you think a well-functioning board is integral to the success of democratic capitalism. Now, how many people think that that's the reason for being on a board? Not, not many. Like, and most…”
Roger Martin: Massive Founder Delusion Is Essential for Economic Innovation
“The economy is underpinned by delusion in, in, in that we do know that nine out of 10 kind of startups expire with a hundred percent of the resources kind of wasted.
If anybody
Thought those were the odds that they personally were facing.
They wouldn't do i…”
Roger Martin: Education System Prioritizes Knowledge Dumping Over Teaching Thinking
“I mean, I think the education System, you know, has got a fundamental assumption that the job is to, you know, unzip the top of your head and pour knowledge in rather than to teach you how to think.”
Roger Martin: Business schools fail to teach cross-domain problem solving
“Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business. I mean, that's pretty bad, right? What they teach are finance. What they teach is marketing to teach us HR. And as the great, greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, there…”
Martin: Business school success stories would have succeeded without it
“I think business education draws in Lots of people who would have succeeded without it. They're the ones, that small percentage of people who can integrate, who just learned early on in their life, one way or another, long before they got to business school, h…”
Roger Martin: Grade 10 students solve integrative problems as well as MBAs
“These girls who were grade 10 girls, so they had definitively six fewer years of formal education, right? Grade 11, grade 12, four years of undergrad compared to our MBAs and our MBAs on average have about four and a half years of work experience. So they have…”
Martin: MBA Programs Indoctrinate Students to Be Narrow 'Tool Matchers'
“They come in indoctrinated into the notion that my job as a business person is to figure out into what category this problem that I'm facing falls and then apply that tool. Ah, this is a finance problem, so I will apply the capital asset pricing model, or this…”
Roger Martin: Harvard Business School cases artificially illustrate single narrow tools
“When you do a case study the case has been written to illustrate a tool. Right? The answer comes from applying a given tool, like, and you, and we're made to think, oh, these are just general business situations. No, they're not. The writing of Harvard Busines…”
Roger Martin: Partial equilibrium economists outnumber general equilibrium thinkers a thousand to one
“There are a thousand partial equilibrium economists for every single general equilibrium economist. And so we have economists who kind of know everything about, you know, whatever fiscal policy, but nothing about labor policy or labor economics or environmenta…”
Martin: CEOs must build operational slack or efficiency will kill organizations
“Part of the CEO's job is to create enough of that discretion. So that they can do those things, right? That that they know are going to be in the interest longterm, like in your case, building up some slack, you know, for the bad times because if they don't bu…”
Roger Martin: Retail stockbrokers are inherently bad at picking stocks
“There's only one thing you can know absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt about a stockbroker. The only thing that's for sure, you don't know if they're male or female, young or old, but what you know is that they're crummy at picking stocks.”
Martin: Young children learn integrative thinking easily without entrenched binary biases
“The bottom line is, is that they don't need to be untaught anything, right? So that's their gigantic advantage. They're easily smart enough, and they don't have a view already built up that life is full of either or choices, where it's the devil or the deep bl…”
Martin: Integrative thinking requires pushing opposing models to extremes before synthesizing
“Rather than saying, let's think about something in between right away, you say, let's push those to the extreme, the completely exclusive film festival, the completely inclusive film festival, right? And then you lay out how they work. How do that do each of t…”
Roger Martin: The most powerful strategy question is 'what would have to be true?'
“The most powerful question in strategy is what would have to be true? Not what is true. What would have to be true for that to be a great idea?”
Martin: Use integrative thinking only when all available options are unappealing
“If the choice is, is between kind of lying on the beach or getting kicked in the groin, You don't need to use integrative thinking. I'll take lying on a beach, right? But it's when you feel like, oh, I hate the fact that I have to, that I apparently have to ch…”
Roger Martin: Great companies must irrevocably commit assets to strategic decisions
“Because you have to commit
Assets irrevocably to decisions to be great as a company.
You can't just say, well, we'll do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and we'll shift and change.”
Roger Martin: Leaders who do not genuinely love people cannot be great
“I just don't know any, what I think of as great, great leaders who don't love other people.
I mean, if you think people are annoying and you have to put up with them and put up with their foibles rather than you genuinely love them, then I think you can only b…”
Roger Martin: The Primary Failure Mode Is Keeping All Options Open
“The failure mode I see probably more than anything else is Somebody who is what I think of as not strategic, right? Which is that they believe that they need to always keep all their options open, not make big choices and sort of see what evolves and then just…”
The other half of the tape: Roger Martin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on the Knowledge Project. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rory Sutherland 2
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #97 Roger Martin: Forward Thinking | Nov 24, 2020 | 1h 1m |