What drives the work of the world’s leading management thinkers?
That was the question posed at Thinkers50@BUQuestrom: Passion & Purpose, a live virtual event held at Boston University Questrom School of Business on 20th April 2023. Co-sponsored by Thinkers50, Passion & Purpose sought to uncover the motivation behind top management thinkers: what directs their research? What keeps them awake at night and gets them out of bed in the morning? In a fast-paced ideas jam, 14 thinkers each had 15 minutes to present their passion and purpose.
Next up was Roger Martin, the #1 Ranked Thinker in 2017. What gets Martin up in the morning, he revealed, is tackling the great enemy of poor management theories and bad business models. Strategy, for example, is not distinct from, or separate to its execution (you can’t just blame implementation for the failure of a strategy). And if you can close the gap between what humans should be able to accomplish if they’re using good business models, and what they do accomplish if they’re using bad models, he contended, you will make the world a better place.