4 September 2017

The Brightline Initiative and Thinkers50 announce partnership

LONDON: Thinkers50, the premier ranking of global business thinkers, (www.thinkers50.com) and The Brightline™ Initiative (www.brightline.org) today announced a new partnership. It means Brightline will be the leading partner for the Thinkers50 2017 Gala event on 13 November in London and that the two will work together on future content creation projects.

“Thinkers50 is passionate about ideas and how they can change the world of business and beyond,” says Thinkers50 co-founder Stuart Crainer. “With its focus on how ideas are turned into reality, Brightline is a perfect fit with the Thinkers50 mission. We will be collaborating on a new book project and our podcast series, as well as at our Thinkers50 2017 Gala, where we announce the new ranking and the winners of Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards. We look forward to a productive and interesting partnership.”

Launched early in 2017, The Brightline Initiative is a coalition founded by Agile Alliance, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and the Project Management Institute (PMI). Its objective is to become the leading authority on strategic initiative management with the aim of helping enterprises reduce the failure rate of large- scale strategic initiatives and avoid the resulting loss of competitive advantage and destruction of value.

Brightline executive director Ricardo Vargas says, “Thinkers50 celebrates and convenes the very best in management thinking. Our partnership will give us access to some of the best thinkers in the fields of strategy and executing on strategy. We look forward to making a difference in ensuring that ideas become value-creating action.”

On November 13, 2017, thinkers from around the world will convene in London to discover the winners of our prestigious Distinguished Achievement Awards at an event described as the “Oscars of management thinking.” Brightline will sponsor the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. Previous winners of this award include Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne; Rita McGrath; and Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur.

The thinkers shortlisted for the 2017 Brightline Initiative-Thinkers50 Strategy Award are:

  1. Weiru Chen
    Weiru Chen is an associate professor of strategy at the China Europe International Business School, where he teaches industry and competitive analysis, business model innovation, and strategy. He is the author (with Cho-Hsuan Yu) of Platform Strategy: Business Model Revolution, a Chinese bestseller based on a study of 40 Chinese firms and 20 global companies.
  2. Richard D’Aveni
    The Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, D’Aveni is the author of a number of influential books including Hypercompetition (Free Press, 1994), Beating the Commodity Trap (HBR Press, 2009) and Strategic Capitalism (McGraw-Hill, 2012). His forthcoming book, When Titans Rule the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), builds on his HBR article “3-D Printing Will Change the World,” and charts the rise of “pan-industrial” manufacturers.
  3. Pankaj Ghemawat
    Indian-born Pankaj Ghemawat is the professor of management and strategy and director of the Center for the Globalization of Education and Management at the Stern School of Business. He is also the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Spain. He is the author of World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve it (HBR Press, 2011) and The Laws of Globalization (Cambridge, 2017).
  4. W Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne
    The authors of the bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy (HBR, 2005), which has sold more than 3.5 million copies, Kim and Mauborgne are professors of strategy at INSEAD and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. Most recently, they are the authors of Blue Ocean Shift (Hachette, 2017).
  5. Rita G McGrath
    On the faculty of Columbia Business School since 1993, Rita McGrath is the author of The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard, 2013). She is also co-author of MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth (HBR Press, 2005) and The Entrepreneurial Mindset (HBR Press, 2000). Her next project, tentatively entitled “Discovery Driven Advantage” examines how companies can build true proficiency in innovation.
  6. Roger Martin
    The former dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Martin is a strategy advisor to CEOs worldwide and the author of ten books, including Thinkers50 award winners Playing to Win (with AG Lafley, HBR Press, 2013)and Getting Beyond Better (with Sally Osberg, HBR Press, 2015). His new book Creating Great Choices (with Jennifer Riel, HBR Press, 2017) follows up on his 2007 bestseller The Opposable Mind (HBR Press).
  7. Alex Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
    Yves Pigneur is a Belgian computer scientist and Alex Osterwalder is a Swiss consultant, and founder of Strategyzer. They are the authors of Business Model Generation (Wiley, 2010), which has sold more than one million copies in 30 languages. They invented the “Business Model Canvas,” used by companies worldwide. The original book has been followed by Business Model You (Wiley, 2012) and Value Proposition Design (Wiley, 2014).
  8. András Tilcsik
    Hungarian-born Tilcsik is an assistant professor of strategic management at the Rotman School of Management and a faculty fellow at the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship. In 2015, he and Chris Clearfield won the Bracken Bower Prize from McKinsey and the Financial Times, given to the best business book proposal by scholars under 35. The book, Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It is forthcoming (Penguin, 2018).

About The Brightline Initiative

The Brightline Initiative is a coalition of leading global organizations dedicated to helping executives bridge the expensive and unproductive gap between strategy design and delivery. Brightline conducts thought leadership research and promotes best practices designed to improve an organization’s ability to deliver on strategic intent. It will be publishing its first report, based on a survey of 500 executives, in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit, later in September.

About Thinkers50

Thinkers50 scans, ranks, and shares the very best in management ideas. Its definitive global ranking of management thinkers is published every two years. The #1 ranked thinker in 2015 was Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School who also topped the ranking in 2005. Previous top-ranked thinkers include Clay Christensen (2013 and 2011); CK Prahalad (2009 and 2007); and Peter Drucker (2003 and 2001). For Thinkers50 2017, nearly 7,000 people nominated thinkers for the ranking. 2,400 people nominated thinkers for Distinguished Achievement Awards.

Contacts

Thinkers50

Des Dearlove
[email protected]
www.thinkers50.com

Brightline

Ricardo Viana Vargas
Executive Director

US: +1 212 300 7372
Portugal: +351 961 503 806