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Costas Markides

Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School

About

Gender: Male

Nationality: United Kingdom

Languages: English

Travels from: United Kingdom

Engagement Types

Topics

Table of Contents

Biography Highlights

Costas Markides is considered one of the world’s leading experts in the areas of business strategy and strategic innovation and has appeared several times on the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management gurus.

Biography

Costas Markides is Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School (LBS) where he holds the Robert P. Bauman Chair of Strategic Leadership. He is also the Faculty Director for Executive Education at LBS.

Professor Markides is the author or co-author of several best-selling business books including All the Right Moves, Fast Second and Game-Changing Strategies.

Costas Markides’ Career experience

A graduate of Harvard Business School and Boston University, Costas Markides worked as an Associate with the Cyprus Development Bank and as a Research Associate at Harvard Business School before joining London Business School in 1990. He has taught on a wide range of in-company programmes and serves on the Editorial Board of several academic journals. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) and on the Academic Board of the Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM).

Costa has worked with many corporate brands during his career including Boeing, Unilever, Honeywell, LVMH, Nestle and Sara Lee.

Publications, consultancy and other activities

Costas Markides has written about a broad range of business issues including strategic innovation, corporate restructuring, business model innovation and international acquisitions. His publications have appeared in numerous academic journals as well as leading managerial journals such as the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review.

Costas is also a member of the Editorial Boards of the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Strategy and Management and Sloan Management Review. He is a member of the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society and participated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland during 1999-2003 and 2012-2013.

The books written by Costas Markides include: Game-Changing strategies: How to Create New Market Space in Established Industries by Breaking the Rules; Diversification, Refocusing and Economic Performance, and All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy. He has also co-authored several other books including Strategic Thinking for the Next Economy and Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets, which was shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Management Book of the Year award in 2005.

In recent years, Costas has further expanded his contributions to strategic thinking and innovation with three new publications:

Organizing for the New Normal: Prepare Your Company for the Journey of Continuous Disruption (2021)
Business Model Innovation: Strategic and Organizational Issues for Established Firms (2023)
Diversification in the World of Data and AI (2025)

Costas Markides’ current research interests focus on corporate entrepreneurship, the management of business model innovation and the use of creativity to achieve strategic breakthroughs.

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Popular Talks

International Competitiveness

Available: Virtually

Restructuring

Available: Virtually

The Management of Diversified Firms

Available: Virtually

Corporate entrepreneurship

Available: Virtually

Refocusing and International Acquisitions

Available: Virtually

The Use of Innovation and Creativity

Available: Virtually

Books

Diversification in the World of Data and AI (Elements in Business Strategy)

The datafication of digital reality and the diffusion of increasingly powerful AI systems have transformed the context within which diversification takes place, resulting in new realities for firms and necessitating new organizational capabilities. Building on their own field research and the existing literature on digitalization and diversification, the authors show how external technological and market changes influence the extent and type of diversification that firms can undertake. They argue that to succeed with digital diversification, new capabilities are needed and that these capabilities are not distributed evenly across firms. Only firms that possess these capabilities will undertake more diversification, with all other firms remaining focused. The authors finally argue that the necessary structures and the appropriate management of business units will differ from those used in the past because the digital context has brought to the fore new problems and risks for diversified firms. These are explored in this Element.

Business Model Innovation: Strategic and Organizational Issues for Established Firms

Digital technologies have allowed for the proliferation of new business models, something that has attracted the attention of academic research. Much of this research has focused on (i) understanding what a business model is and its theoretical connection to the concept of strategy, and (ii) exploring what business model innovation is and what its sources and outcomes are. Less work has gone into studying the issues that established firms face in business model innovation – such as how to respond to the arrival of a disruptive business model in one’s industry, or how to compete with dual business models or how to migrate from one business model to another. This Element approaches the topic of business model innovation from the perspective of the established firm and examines the unique strategic and organizational issues that big, established companies face when a new business model enters their markets.

Organizing for the New Normal: Prepare Your Company for the Journey of Continuous Disruption

We live in a world of continuous disruption. Before we have a chance to respond to one disruption, another hits. Before we finish one transformation journey, we need to embark on another. How do you prepare the organization for this new normal of continuous disruption? This is the challenge that every organization is now facing, no matter how successful their digital transformation of the past decade has been. Organizing for the New Normal explores how to prepare the organization for this unique challenge. How do you develop a strategy for what is coming next while you are busily driving your current transformation? And how do you convince emotionally exhausted employees to join you on the journey? The book does not provide a ready-made recipe for success, but rather explores how to put together the ingredients that will improve the odds of success. Organizing for the New Normal outlines the leadership competencies critical for success in the “new normal”, such as: · How to create a “permanent” sense of urgency and an organization-wide unease with the status quo · How to convince people to exploit disruption as an opportunity when all they see around them are the negative consequences of disruption · How to institutionalize into the DNA of the organization the day to day behaviors that would allow us to identify and respond to change early-and how to achieve this in a decentralized way · How to develop a strategic response that is innovative and aims to attack the disruption rather than defend against it.

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