About this episode

Rita McGrath discusses how leaders can adapt to change and the importance of strategic centering in a shifting business landscape.

Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it. Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and the author of The End of Competitive Advantage and Seeing Around Corners. In this episode, Rita takes me inside her "flops file" ... a collection of corporate disasters so expensive you have to lose fifty million dollars to make the list. We talk about why the old rules of strategy have stopped working, why treating failure as learning is so hard for experienced operators, and how the best leaders manage the one resource they can never get back: their own time and attention. She shares the idea of strategic centering ... working out what your organisation is truly grounded on ... and why a scientist running a science company, or a technologist running a technology company, now has an advantage the generalist CEO does not. And she makes the case that we are living through a genuine…

More episodes of The Unlock Moment: The Inner Shift That Changes How You Lead

• 193 Mohan Nair, Author, Speaker and Transformation Leader: How Not To Lose Your Mind In An AI-Obsessed Era · August 28, 2026 · 58 min
• 192 Neri Karra Sillaman, Author, Professor and Entrepreneur: What Immigrant-Founded Businesses Can Teach Us About Resilience In Leadership · August 3, 2026 · 50 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Unlock Moment: The Inner Shift That Changes How You Lead podcast page.