RGM

Brand Management re-posted Rita McGrath's post We do it because we really care - health insurers try empathy.

• Posted: Thursday, July 22, 2010

Innovation Management recommends Rita McGrath's Thinking the Unthinkable post at Harvard Business Review in its post about summer blogging. To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Thursday, July 22, 2010

Rita McGrath is quoted at the CFOZone.com site in a post by Sheryl Nash. "Companies all too often stick with losing ventures despite signs of trouble, critics contend. But they acknowledge that it is often difficult to determine just how long is too long."

"The majority of companies I work with have no rigorous process for disengaging at all, with the result that it usually ends in a nasty mess," says Rita Gunther McGrath, an associate professor at the Columbia University business school. Instead, Gunther McGrath says, they explain away declines in these benchmarks, even though they are indicative of larger potential problems. And without a plan to turn things around, those problems will inevitably materialize, she says.

To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Thursday, July 22, 2010

Rita McGrath's most recent post Benefits of Thinking the Unthinkable at the Harvard Business Review has been published. An excerpt is below.

"My colleague Gökçe Sargut and I are doing some work on how executives can improve the way their organizations operate under conditions of complexity. As we did the background research, I was fascinated by counterintuitive thinking from Aaron Wildavsky, a well-known social scientist. He argued that when facing risks, organizations have two basic possible responses. Systems can be designed to stave off risks, or they can be designed to be resilient, so that when terrible things happen the system can respond. Most organizations are heavily biased toward risk prevention: we create systems so risk-averse that we truncate learning, sometimes even increasing the very risks we’re trying to avoid."

First Friday Book Synopsis has referred to the post.

• Posted: Monday, July 12, 2010

In late June, Rita McGrath spoke at the annual CFO Core Concerns Conference in Baltimore. Here is a review of her talk at the Rochester StartUps blog.

"Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia University, gave an awesome talk on using Discovery Driven techniques to stimulate, encourage and foster innovation and growth within large companies. In discussing the topic with her after her speech I discovered she has a similar presentation that applies to entrepreneurs, and another that applies specifically to software development. Interestingly, she’d heard little of Agile Methodology, which her proposed tactic resembles."

• Posted: Tuesday, July 06, 2010

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