Rita McGrath

Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, is a renowned American strategic management scholar known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. An expert on strategy in environments in which competitive advantages are temporary, her cutting-edge ideas help CEOs and senior executives hone their innovation, growth, and disengagement processes to succeed in rapidly changing environments, turning strategic threats into profitable opportunities.

Known for her ability to connect research to business problems, McGrath speaks regularly at corporate events, such as the Microsoft CEO Summit and the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Beyond her role in academia, McGrath is also recognized as a business writer and speaker. She is associated with Innosight and is the founder of the innovation platform Valize.

Her book, "Discovery Driven Growth" was named one of BusinessWeek's best design & innovation books. Her methodology for business planning (originally published in a best-selling Harvard Business Review article) was cited by Clayton Christensen as an antidote to “innovation killers.” McGrath is one of the most widely published authors in the Harvard Business Review, having written twelve articles, including Failing By Design. Some of her other notable publications include "The Entrepreneurial Mindset," "MarketBusters," "The End of Competitive Advantage," and "Seeing Around Corners."

McGrath's significant contributions to her field have been recognized with numerous awards. She is a recipient of the 2022 C.K. Prahalad Award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society, the Maurice Holland Award, and the Distinguished Achievement Award in 2013. In 2009, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, an honor accorded to those who have had a significant impact on the field. She has also been ranked as one of the top management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, a distinction she again achieved in the most recent rankings.

Before joining academia, McGrath started her career working in government and the political arena. She joined the faculty of Columbia Business School in 1993, and prior to that, she was an IT director, worked in the political arena and founded two start-ups. McGrath received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. She teaches MBA and Executive MBA courses, and is the Faculty Director for the Columbia Executive Education program Leading Strategic Growth and Change. Her academic contributions also include authoring strategic management cases and contributing to the field of absorptive capacity.