Roger L. Martin is Professor Emeritus of Strategic Management, at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he served as Dean (1998–2013) and as Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute (2013–2019). In 2017 Thinkers50 named him the world’s #1 management thinker.
In this podcast with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, he discusses insights from his new book, When More is Not Better, which analyzes the growing inequality in American society as a threat to the democratic-capitalism underpinning its historical success. Martin posits that treating the economy as a machine and over-emphasizing efficiency drives this inequal distribution of the spoils of growth. The book advocates the alternative metaphor of the economy as a complex adaptive system that encourages a new set of behaviors from business executives, politicians, educators and citizens — which could sustain democratic capitalism.