Roger Martin: A New Way To Think

Thinking About Thinking, Mental Models, And How To Become A Reflective Thinker

This Pirate Profile is inspired by Roger Martin on Christopher Lochhead's Follow Your Different podcast.

Pirate Profiles is a series by Category Pirates spotlighting legendary Category Designers across a wide range of industries and disciplines.

In these Pirate Profiles, you will discover:

• Untold stories of Category Designers who shaped the world we live in today (that you probably have never heard of before—but whose products, services, and platforms you have used thousands of times!).

• The radically different POVs these Category Designers evangelized in the world—and the obstacles they had to overcome to move people’s thinking FROM where it was TO somewhere new.

• Their strategies, frameworks, and mental models for successfully designing & dominating new categories of consequence.

Every legendary entrepreneur, executive, investor, and creator of any kind is a Category Designer.

We want to tell their stories—because the best way to become a Pirate is to study other Pirates.

ARRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,

Most people today do not think for themselves. 

They simply repeat (or retweet) something they heard or read, and liked, because it confirmed what they already believed. 

This reactive, non-reflective thinking leads to:

• Undifferentiated businesses that fall into The “Better” Trap

• Social media echo chambers

• Baseless conspiracy theories

• Anger and violence

• Political division and partisanship

There is, however, another way to think that leads to constructive dialogue and legendary category creation. 

Professor and best-selling author Roger Martin calls it reflective thinking.

Martin, one of the world’s most influential thinkers, recently released a book called A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness. This book compiles many of his Harvard Business Review articles about the true nature of competition, how company success revolves around customers, how strategy and execution are the same thing, and much more. Martin was a guest on Pirate Christopher’s Follow Your Different podcast, where he shared the various categories of thinking and useful frameworks for deep thinking.

As we say, thinking about thinking is the most important kind of thinking.

So, we’re sharing Martin’s insights on what it means to think, how to apply thinking to category design, and the steps to become a reflexive thinker.

Let’s jump in.