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Roger Martin

Roger Martin is the dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He was appointed to a seven-year term beginning on September 1, 1998.

A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Martin was a director of Monitor Co., a strategy-consulting firm, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a global network of offices and activities. He was the founding chairman of Monitor University, the firm's educational arm. He received his AB from Harvard College with a concentration in economics and his MBA from the Harvard Business School. Currently, he serves as a director on the boards of the Thomson Corp., Celestica Inc., the Ontario SuperBuild Corp., and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Wrote about: The Promise of Fast Education

Is learning: Martin is currently finishing a book on leadership collaboration, is working to create the most innovative collaboration yet between business schools and the venture-capital industry, and is planning for ways to change the way ethics is taught to make it more actionable.

The staff at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management want classroom experiences to be generative, resulting from interactions and real-time exercises between classmates. To that end, they have launched several new courses, including one called "Learning How to Learn," which focuses almost exclusively on interactive exercises that help students understand and overcome their limits to learning. It's designed to increase students' long-term ability not only to be more self-reflective, but also to learn on the job in real time.

Is reading:

• Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not
  By Chris Argyris
• Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
  Edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington
• Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs
  By Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, Alex Lowy

Coordinates: martin@mgmt.utoronto.ca

Thornton May

Thornton May has emerged as a trusted advisor for senior executives seeking to understand the rules, roles, and wrongs of the new economy.

May is the corporate futurist and chief awareness officer of Guardent, a digital-security services firm. He also serves on the faculty of the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, where he teaches the "Managing the Information Resource" program; of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where he teaches the "Inside the IP Tornado: Silicon Valley" and advanced-management programs; and of Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a part of the faculty team that created the e-commerce program.

May is probably best known not for his humorous and scathingly honest speeches or his hands-on and deeply committed approach to organizational problem solving, but for the openness and accessibility of his network. He knows a lot of people who know a whole lot of things.