Summary & Highlights
Sue talks with Cynthia Montgomery, Timken Professor of Business Administration and immediate past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she’s taught for over twenty years.
Cynthia discusses her book, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs and teaches the strategic tools to not only outwit your competitors but offer you, as a leader, the means to shape your organization decisively.
Cynthia has successfully distilled the lessons from her popular executive courses into the book. Driven by the voices and experiences of executives she has taught from around the world, she urges leaders to embrace their role as strategists, uniquely positioned to answer the most essential question facing every business: does your company truly matter?
Guest Profile
Cynthia Montgomery is a professor of business administration and former head of the strategy unit at Harvard Business School, where she has taught for 20 years. For the past six years, she has led the strategy track in the school’s owner/president management executive education program, which attracts leaders of midsized companies worldwide.
Her research centers on strategy and corporate governance. Of particular interest are the unique roles leaders play in developing and implementing strategy; the means organizations use to create value across multiple lines of business; and issues related to corporate boards of directors.
Cynthia has published extensively in the fields of strategy and economics. Her work has appeared in nearly a dozen top-tier managerial and academic outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Strategic Management Journal, The Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, The Journal of Business, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, and others.
She is the author of The Strategist: Be the Leader your Business Needs (HarperBusiness, 2012); the co-author of Corporate Strategy: Resources and the Scope of the Firm (with David J. Collis), the editor of Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm, and the co-editor of Strategy: Seeking and Securing Competitive Advantage (with Michael E. Porter).
Montgomery has served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 companies–NewellRubbermaid, Inc. and UnumProvident–and a number of mutual funds managed by BlackRock, Inc. She has also served on several not-for-profit boards, including Harvard Business Publishing and McLean Hospital.