Integrative Thinking—the idea Roger Martin has made a buzzword—is a new way to teach business; the old approach has changed little since the early 20th Century, and is ill-suited to deal with the complexities demanded by the modern economy. Working with many variables simultaneously—customers, employees, cost structures, and regulatory environment—not just one or a subset of the above is at the core of Integrative Thinking. Today's business problems don't fall neatly into self-contained categories, such as marketing or finance. They sprawl messily across many of them. Martin's approach equips his students with the tools and models to navigate this new reality—to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, to generate a creative resolution by forming a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but which is superior to each.

In 2007, Martin was named one of the 10 Most Influential Business School Professors in the world by BusinessWeek: "Managers who want to 'get' the new innovation paradigm should check out [Rotman's] MBA and exec-ed programs." The Financial Times ranks Rotman in the Top 15 MBA programs in North America, writing: “A handful of enlightened business school deans—such as Robert Joss at Stanford, Dipak Jain at Kellogg and Roger Martin at the Rotman School—are starting to preach the gospel of integrated thinking, cross-disciplinary studies and learning-by-doing.”

On top of his duties as Dean, Martin also holds the Premier's Chair in Competitiveness and Productivity, and teaches strategic management, with research interests in global competitiveness, business design, corporate social responsibility, and Integrative Thinking. He is the author of The Responsibility Virus and The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 2007 by The Globe and Mail. He is Director of the AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship, and serves on the Boards of The Thomson Corporation, Research in Motion, and The Skoll Foundation. Previously, he spent 13 years as a Director of Monitor Company, where he served as co-head of the firm for two years. He is a recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Visionary Leadership Award.

If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin. Though following “best practice” can help in some ways, it also poses a danger. By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you’ll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. "Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do," Martin says, "we need to understand and emulate how they think."

Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls Integrative Thinking—creatively resolving the tension in opposing models by forming entirely new and superior ones. Drawing on stories of leaders as diverse as AG Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Meg Whitman of eBay, and Victoria Hale of the Institute for One World Health, Martin shows how integrative thinkers are relentlessly diagnosing and synthesizing by asking probing questions. “What are the causal relationships at work here?” “What are the implied trade-offs?” Martin also presents a model for strengthening the integrative thinking skills of the audience by drawing on different kinds of knowledge—including conceptual and experiential knowledge. Integrative thinking can be learned, he says, and this talk is the first step in helping audience members master this vital skill.