This week on Mind Your F**king Business, Dominic Monkhouse speaks with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, about the complexities of strategy in business and beyond. They explore why great strategies are rare, the CEO’s role in execution, and the dangers of complacency and inward focus.
Martin highlights the importance of imagination, storytelling, and challenging mental models to drive innovation. He shares insights from The Imagination Machine, discussing how to balance running a business with preparing for the future while fostering a culture of curiosity and adaptability.
Follow Martin:
Your strategy needs a strategy
Who is Martin Reeves
Martin is the Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute and one of BCG’s most prolific strategic minds. He is a regular contributor to HBR, MIT SMR, Fortune and other management journals on business strategy and management, as well as a regular public speaker and a repeat TED@BCG presenter. Martin is co-author of The Imagination Machine, an executive’s guide to systematically harnessing imagination for corporate reinvention and rejuvenation.
He also co-wrote Strategy Needs a Strategy, which proposes the strategy palette as a tool to enable business leaders to tune their approach to strategy to the environment of each business. Martin is the editor of the Inspiring the Next Game book series, published by De Gruyter. Finally, he hosts the BCG Henderson Institute’s flagship Thinkers & Ideas podcast. Since joining BCG in 1989, Martin has led a broad range of strategy assignments in the Financial Institutions, Consumer Goods, Industrial Goods and Health Care sectors. He has particular expertise in the areas of adaptive strategy, strategy for multi-business systems, sustainability strategies, ecosystem strategies, collective learning and innovation, corporate vitality, and trust. Martin holds an MBA from Cranfield University School of Management and an MA in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge.
What you’ll learn from Martin
06:23 The Rarity of Great Strategies and Enduring Success
13:10 The Value of Robust and Evolvable Scripts
30:26 Depoliticisation and Depth of Debate in Business
38:05 Curiosity and Continuous Learning
51:25 Business as a Human-Centric Endeavor
Recommended reading
Co-Intelligence: Living and working with AI
Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly