Rita Gunther McGrath

Allow me to formally introduce myself.🤝 My name is Rita McGrath, and I am proud to have authored ideas that the late Clayton Christensen said are "some of the most important in management - ever".👇 ✨With over three decades of experience, I specialize in helping organizations navigate #inflectionpoints and see around corners. 💡I provide guidance for people to develop an entrepreneurial mindset to empower leaders to face an uncertain future with confidence and courage. 📚As a best-selling author, @columbia_biz professor, and business consultant, my mission is to help you turn ideas into real opportunities. 🚀In the corporate sphere, there's always room to think differently and reach new heights. 👉Learn more at RitaMcGrath.com. #ritamcgrathgroup #businesstips #entrepreneur #seeingaroundcorners #ceomindset #innovation #inflectionpoints #inflection #business #strategy

The turning point that @CarlotaPrzPerez continues to destabilize once-unstoppable giants fastcompany.com/91572028/volks…

Challenges facing Big Auto - which @ChrisRangen has been talking about for years! fastcompany.com/91572028/volks…

This is so sad @ericries has a few choice words to say about the practices of self-dealing extractive firms like much (not all, but much) of Private Equity.

In a de-materializing era, finding your strategic center has never been more important. chiefexecutive.net/how-to-find-an…

So I challenged the participants in a recent program to gladly email me at my @AOL address which is rgmcgrath@aol.com. No takers, despite my encouragement! See this for why AOL is still valuable: marketplace.org/story/2026/06/…

What the American fans did the twist the way the Norway fans do the rowing? Someone could make that happen

This should be required reading for any organization stumbling into the use of AI: bcg.com/publications/2… @BCG @mattbeane

When picking a CEO, consider your organization's center. New article in Fast Company fastcompany.com/91562845/when-…

To think I'm going to be famous for my AOL account! @Marketplace marketplace.org/story/2026/06/…

Great piece on communication from @Abrahams_Matt fastcompany.com/91543784/in-th…

What motivates someone with a lovely family to become a copyright troll? @MatHigbee

Well this was fun! @Marketplace on why zombie companies like @AOL may yet gain a second life when combining their data with that of other zombie companies - I'm quoted, check it out! marketplace.org/story/2026/06/…

When the unit economics stop adding up, eventually greed turns to fear, we have the economy-wide equivalent of a run on the bank and a bubble that goes "poof" - cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-cont… Are we ready?

What if the AI excitement IS a bubble and there IS a crash?! Is government prepared to confront the consequences and, not just save finance as in 2008, but save the victims and the economy? This from @asad09 is essential reading: cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-URL/wp-cont…

Likewise @m_g_nichols ! Always a joy to reflect on the incongruities of human organizations.

If it looks like a bubble and the economics are those of a bubble, isn't it time we started contemplating what to do when it bursts? doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralis… @CarlotaPrzPerez

You know @scottdwitt, you would think after 30+ years we would have figured out that making the same mistakes over and over without learning from them is not a good use of time or money!

This was fun! A conversation about "Human Magic" with Johan Roos - now on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=etk6sa…

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

I love this phrase: "It's hard to raise kids and disrupt civilization at the same time." Courtesy @WIRED wired.com/story/meet-the… @CarlotaPrzPerez