Roger Martin - The Opposable Mind

Roger Martin is the author of "The Opposable Mind", a delightful little book about the power of integrative thinking, which ties in very nicely with TOC's approach to solving problems using the evaporating cloud.  Roger very kindly offered to answer a few questions.

Q1:  Hi Roger, I read your hbr article "How Successful Leaders Think" when it came out last year and I loved it.  I'm currently mid way through your book and I'm even more impressed.  Congratulations and thank you ... you've done a fantastic job.  Can you tell us a little about yourself - both personally (if you don't mind) and professionally?

 

I am a Canadian from a small town about 70 miles west of Toronto.  I was born in 1956.  After graduating from the local regional secondary school, I attending Harvard College and earned my AB concentrating in economics in 1979.  I then went to Harvard Business School and after graduation in 1981, I entered the field of strategy consulting.  Several years later a banded together with a group of friends and acquaintances at HBS to build Monitor Company into a big, global strategy consulting firm. In 1998, the President of University of Toronto approached me to become the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at UofT.  I have been the Dean since the summer of 1998.

 

My interests are in how highly successful leaders think, how companies can be more innovative and creative, how regions compete and how corporations can be better social citizens while being competitively successful. I like writing and have published several books and over 100 articles. 

Q2 - The reason I initially contacted you was because I was impressed with how much your work resonated with Eli Goldratt's thinking processes - especially the Conflict Cloud tool.  Can you describe the concept of "Integrative Thinking?"

 

I define Integrative Thinking as the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing models and instead of choosing  one at the expense of the other, to generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models but is superior to each.

 

That is to say, Integrative Thinkers do not see their jobs as choosing from existing models or options, but rather as creating new, better models using the data and insights from the existing models.  This requires Integrative Thinkers to grow the capacity to hold multiple, often-conflicting models in their heads at the same time and use the models to create a better model. 

Q3 - The examples in your book were very rich.  How did you find them?  Would you mind sharing an example?

 

Thanks.  I really tried to utilize examples to make the book readable and understandable.  I found the examples by interviewing over 50 leader who have produced exemplary success. I talked to them from 90 minutes to 8 hours each.

 

An example is Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat Software, now the dominant Linux provider in the world.  He came and gave seven talks in front of our students during which I asked him a series of questions about how he had made his most important decisions.  His biggest decision was what to do when facing two dominant industry models, neither of which were particularly attractive for him. The first was the proprietary software model (like Microsoft).  While a highly profitable model for those with software that had arisen from extensive proprietary research and development, it didn’t work for the Linux world because Linux was open source and not subject to protection. However, the other dominant model, the “free software model” wasn’t attractive to Bob Young either.  It entailed assembling Linux packages and selling copies on disk for $10-15 a copy.  Bob realized that business would never be more than low-margin fringe commodity business serving sophisticated individuals.

 

Rather than choosing one model or the other, he innovated a new model.  He made Red Hat software free and easily downloadable off the Internet in order to make it the dominant version of Red Hat.  Then he worked to make Red Hat a service provider to large corporations who were confident enough to utilize a Linux solution from the dominant provider, but who needed service help to manager their use of the software.  This new model transformed Red Hat into a Linux leader and a highly successful software company – the only remaining consequential Linux provider.

Q4 - Can you tell us how you discovered the idea of "Integrative Thinking"?  I know you've been playing with it for a number of years.  When did you decide that it was important enough to warrant a book?

 

I started thinking about it and interviewing highly successful leaders in 1990.  As I began to see the vague outlines of patterns to the thinking of these highly successful leaders, I accelerated the pace of the interviewing in 2001.  But about 2004, I knew that I needed to write a book.  I wrote a book proposal in late 2005, agreed to a publishing contract with Harvard Business School Press in the spring of 2006, wrote the first draft in the summer of 2006 and submitted a final manuscript in the spring of 2007.

 

In the summer of 2007, I began work on my next book – Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage.