Rita Gunther McGrath

Rita Gunther McGrath (born July 28, 1959, in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American scholar in strategic management and a professor of management at Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.^[1][2]

McGrath is also the founder of the innovation platform Valize.^[3]

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.^[4]

After graduating in 1993, McGrath joined Columbia as Assistant Professor of Management. In 1998, she was promoted to Associate Professor of Management, and later she became a full Professor in the Faculty of Executive Education.. In 2009, she was elected Fellow of the Strategic Management Society,^[5] and in 2014 she was elected their Deputy Dean of their Fellows.^[6]

In 2013, she was elected Fellow of the International Academy of Management.

McGrath is the author of five books, including “Discovery Driven Planning” (1995), which introduced a framework for managing strategic uncertainty in innovation-driven initiatives. ^[7]

• 2022: C. K. Prahalad award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society^[8]
• 2022: Inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame by the Business Excellence Institute
• 2016: Theory to Practice award from the Vienna Strategy Forum
• 2013: Distinguished Achievement Award in Strategy from Thinkers50^[9]

• 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.

• 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)

• Official website
• Columbia directory page