Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Platzhalter Speakers
Roger L. Martin
CA

Academic Director,
Martin Prosperity Institute,
Rotman School of Management

Biography

Roger Martin is the Premier’s Research Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness and Academic Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management.  He served as dean of the Rotman School from1998 until.  Previously, he spent 13 years as a Director of Monitor Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he served as co-head of the firm for two years.


His research work is in Integrative Thinking, Business Design, Corporate Social Responsibility and Country Competitiveness.  He writes extensively and is a regular contributor to:  Harvard Business Review’s The Conversation blog, the Financial Times’ Judgment Call column, and Washington Post’s On Leadership blog.  He has written fourteen Harvard Business Review articles and published eight books: Fixing the Game (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011):  The Design of Business (Harvard Business School Press, 2009); The Opposable Mind (Harvard Business School Press, 2007); The Responsibility Virus (Basic Books, 2002); Canada: What It Is, What It Can Be (with Jim Milway, Rotman-UTP Publishing, 2012); and Diaminds (with Mihnea Moldoveanu, University of Toronto Press, 2009), The Future of the MBA (with Mihnea Moldoveanu, Oxford University Press, 2008) and Playing to Win, (co-authored with former P&G Chairman and CEO AG Lafley, Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).  He co-edited Rotman on Design (with Karen Christensen, Rotman/UTP 2013).


In 2011, Roger placed 6th on the Thinkers50 list, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers, sharing the top ten with Clay Christensen, Michael Porter and Malcolm Gladwell, among others.  In 2010, he was named one of the 27 most influential designers in the world by Business Week.  In 2007 he was named a Business Week 'B-School All-Star' for being one of the 10 most influential business professors in the world. Business Week also named him one of seven 'Innovation Gurus' in 2005.


He serves on the Boards of BlackBerry, The Skoll Foundation, and the Canadian Credit Management Foundation.  He is past chair of Tennis Canada and chair of the Ontario Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress.
A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Roger received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.

Abstract

Rising Above Inter-Domain Complexity

The world has always embodied high levels of detail and dynamic complexity. However, it seems increasingly complex because the dominant choice in dealing with its inherent complexity is to sacrifice detail complexity in order to tackle dynamic complexity. This choice creates innumerable knowledge domain siloes and, essentially out of thin air, problematic levels of inter-domain complexity. In order to deal productively with the self-inflicted problem of inter-domain complexity, we need to develop a meta-domain: the domain of knowledge in how to integrate across knowledge domains. This is the knowledge domain that Peter Drucker simply called ‘management’ that both can and should be taught, but rarely is.