Over a stellar career, Roger Martin has advised the CEOs of some of the world’s most successful companies. From the beginning, he noted that almost every executive he talked to had a “model”-a framework or way of thinking that guided their strategy and activities. But these models tended to become automatic, so much so that when one didn’t work, the typical response was just to apply it again-with greater enthusiasm.
Martin took a fresh, critical approach to helping. When company leaders came to him with fundamental questions-How do you decide where to play and how to win? What is the key to shaping and changing corporate culture? How can you design a successful, sustainable innovation process?-his first response was to break the spell of the current model with a memo articulating a new way to think about the problem at hand and a more powerful and effective way to overcome it.
Over time, these ideas worked their way into Martin’s many Harvard Business Review articles. Now, for the first time, they appear together in A New Way to Think. With his trademark incisive intellect and clarity, Martin covers the entire breadth of the management landscape-illuminating the true nature of competition, explaining how company success revolves around customers, revealing how strategy and execution are really the same thing, and much more.

In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders-call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers-develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place. The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneurs actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context. Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.

For its first 200 years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency, spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has grown to a level never seen before. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system, which only works when the average family benefits enough to keep voting for it.
In this book, Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: we have treated the economy as a machine for which the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency is considered an inherently good thing. But it has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with efficiency has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economic outcomes: from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already rich Americans.
Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policymakers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-listen guide for saving democratic capitalism.