Rita McGrath

Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after advisor and speaker, and a longtime faculty member at Columbia Business School. Rita is one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation and is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50.  McGrath’s recent book on strategic inflection points is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Rita is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

At Columbia, Rita directs the popular Executive Education course Leading Strategic Growth and Change.  She guest-lectures in a number of other courses, including the flagship Advanced Management Program, and is active in other Columbia initiatives such as the launch of its Think Bigger Innovation Hub.  She also acts as faculty director for some of Columbia’s prestigious custom programs offerings, learning experiences designed specifically for individual organizations. 

Rita is one of the most frequent contributors to the Harvard Business Review.  Her most recent article is The Permissionless Corporation (Jan/Feb, 2023).  She also publishes regularly in other premier journals such as the MIT Sloan Management Review. Her work on discovery-driven growth was praised by the late legendary management thinker Clayton Christensen as offering “some of the most important tools of management and strategy that have ever been developed.” 

Rita was awarded the prestigious C. K. Prahalad award from the Strategic Management Society, an award for scholarly impact on practice.  She has won many other awards for her work and impact, including the “Theory to Practice” award from the Vienna Strategy Forum, the “best paper” award from the Academy of Management Review and multiple “best book” awards for her work.

McGrath received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She is active on all the main social media platforms, such as Twitter @rgmcgrath, Linked in and Instagram.  For more information, visit RitaMcGrath.com.