Rita Gunther McGrath

Rita Gunther McGrath (born July 28, 1959 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.

McGrath is also the founder of the innovation platform Valize.

Life and work
Rita McGrath's parents were both scientists. Her mother, Helge Liane Gunther, was a microbiologist, and her father, Wolfgang H. H. Gunther, was an organic chemist. She was born in New Haven, CT., as her parents were both working at the Yale Medical School at the time. After Wolfgang made the decision to join Xerox, the family moved to the Rochester, New York area. He subsequently joined Kodak in the late 1970's. McGrath bore witness to the devastation that can occur when a company fails to innovate as the world changes around it.

McGrath graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a Masters of Public Administration from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in 1982. In 1993, she completed her Ph.D. at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) with the dissertation, entitled Developing New Competence in Established Organizations consistent with her longstanding interest in corporate ventures and innovation.

McGrath started her career working in government and the political arena and founded two entrepreneurial startups. After her graduation in 1993, she joined Columbia as assistant professor of management, was promoted to associate professor of management in 1998, and recently became a full professor in the Faculty of Executive Education. In 2014, she was elected Deputy Dean of the Strategic Management Society Fellows

In 1999, McGrath received the "Best Paper" Academy Of Management Review, in 2001 the Maurice Holland "best paper" award from the Industrial Research Institute, and later the McKinsey 'best paper' award from the Strategic Management Society for McGrath and Nerkar, Real options reasoning and a new look at the R&D strategy of pharmaceutical firms.

In 2009, she was elected fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and in 2013 of the International Academy of Management. In 2013 she also received the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy. She was named one of the top 20 thinkers in 2011, and one of the top 10 thinkers in 2013 by Thinkers50.

In 2019, McGrath was ranked the #5 most influential management thinker in the world by Thinkers50. In 2023, McGrath ranked #7 on the Thinkers50 list.

McGrath received the prestigious C. K. Prahalad award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society in 2022. This is one of the most prestigious awards granted by the Society.

McGrath is the bestselling author of five books and is one of the most widely published authors in the Harvard Business Review, including “Discovery Driven Planning” (1995), which was recognized as an early articulation of today’s “lean” startup philosophy and has been cited by Clayton Christensen as “one of the most important ideas in management—ever.” She is the founder of the consulting firm Valize and maintains the weekly newsletter Thought Sparks on LinkedIn.

Her work and research is promoted on her personal website.

Honors and awards

 * 2022 C. K. Prahalad award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society
 * 2022 Inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame by the Business Excellence Institute
 * 2021 ranked the #2 management thinker in the world by Thinkers50
 * In 2019, she was ranked the #5 most influential leadership thinker in the world by Thinkers50
 * 2016 Theory to Practice award from the Vienna Strategy Forum
 * 2013 Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy from Thinkers50
 * In both 2011 and 2013, she was named one of the top 20 thinkers by Thinkers 50, one of the world's most prestigious rankings of management thinkers

Books

 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. The entrepreneurial mindset: Strategies for continuously creating opportunity in an age of uncertainty. Vol. 284. Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. MarketBusters: 40 Strategic moves that drive exceptional business growth. Harvard Business School Press, 2005.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. Discovery Driven Growth: A breakthrough process to reduce risk and seize opportunity. Harvard Business Review Press, 2009.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther The End of Competitive Advantage. How to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. Seeing Around Corners. How to spot inflection points in business before they happen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

Notable articles

 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. “Discovery-driven planning.” Harvard Business Review (1995)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, Ian C. MacMillan, and Sankaran Venkataraman. "Defining and developing competence: a strategic process paradigm." Strategic Management Journal 16.4 (1995): 251-275.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. "A real options logic for initiating technology positioning investments." Academy of Management Review 22.4 (1997): 974-996.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. “Discovering new points of differentiation.” Harvard Business Review (1997)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. "Falling forward: Real options reasoning and entrepreneurial failure." Academy of Management review 24.1 (1999): 13-30.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. "Exploratory learning, innovative capacity, and managerial oversight." Academy of Management Journal 44.1 (2001): 118-131.
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. “MarketBusting: strategies for exceptional business growth.” Harvard Business Review (2005)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ian C. MacMillan. “How to get unstuck.” Harvard Business Review (2009)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. “Failing by design.” Harvard Business Review (2011)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther. “Transient advantage.” Harvard Business Review (2013)
 * McGrath, Rita Gunther, and Ryan McManus. “Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation.” Harvard Business Review (2020)