MIT economists who tested anti-poverty ideas with field experiments, and won the 2019 Nobel for it.
American psychologist; founder of humanistic psychology
American organisational psychologist at Wharton whose work on giving and taking reframed who really gets ahead.
Scottish-American moral philosopher who argued that a human action — and a human life — is intelligible only as part of a story.
Canadian-American psychologist whose idea of self-efficacy — belief in one's ability to do a specific thing — became one of psychology's most-tested concepts.
Harvard Business School professor who named and proved psychological safety — the team condition that lets people admit error and ask for help.
British writer and management observer who read the corporation as a small state, run by faction and alliance.
Surgeon and writer who showed that a short, plain checklist can sharply cut deaths in the operating room. Experts fail not from ignorance but from forgetting.
Stanford behaviour scientist who showed that a behaviour needs three things at once — and that the most reliable one to design for is how easy the act is.
New Zealand literary scholar who argues that storytelling is not a cultural luxury but an evolved adaptation — a safe way to rehearse life.
The economists who proved that the default option, not persuasion, decides what most people do.
British naval historian who, in a 1955 satirical essay, named the patterns that make bureaucracies grow and meetings waste their time.
Stanford psychologist whose mindset theory split how people read their own ability into two camps, fixed and growth.
American journalist and author; the writer who turned habit science into a working vocabulary for change.
Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway, and the practitioner who turned thinking backward — and thinking across disciplines — into a working method.
Brothers and writing partners. They turned a generation of behavioural research into change advice that leaders actually remember.
A Chinese teacher and political advisor of the Spring and Autumn period. His recorded conversations, the Analects, have shaped East Asian thought, governance, and family life for two and a half thousand years.
Italian-American philosopher who showed that what we loosely call “a norm” is really three different things, each changed a different way.
Personality psychologist; the leading figure in narrative identity theory.
Israeli psychologists whose collaboration founded behavioural economics and reshaped how we understand judgement under risk.
American author and former Gore speechwriter who turned the science of motivation into a vocabulary working managers could use.
American change consultant who gave the field the “burning platform.” It names the felt conviction that staying still now costs more than moving.
The development economist who showed that a thirty-cent text message can lift saving. The gap between intention and action is often just memory.
American cognitive scientist and design theorist who showed that most of what we call user error is design error.
American writer and founder of the marketing company StoryBrand.
American philosopher of professional practice who showed that skilled work is a live conversation with the situation, not the application of theory.
Environmental scientist and the clearest writer on systems thinking, the discipline of seeing the structure beneath behaviour.
Network scientist who tests how things actually spread
Organisational psychologist who named the two fears that decide whether people change, and showed why fear alone freezes them.
The University of Rochester pair who built self-determination theory, the modern account of where lasting motivation comes from.
The two psychologists behind goal-setting theory — the most replicated finding on what makes a goal move people.
Canadian psychoanalyst and management theorist who showed that the right number of organisational layers is set by how far ahead each level has to think.
Decision scientists who showed, with organ-donor data, that the single most powerful lever over a choice is what you set as the default.
The sociologist who explained how new ideas spread. Through people, in stages, not all at once.
American political scientist. He wrote the fullest recent account of how durable, impersonal institutions get built, and how they decay.
The Prague writer who gave the modern world its words for what bureaucratic life feels like from the inside.
American psychologist who showed that the things which stop people being unhappy at work are different in kind from the things that make them care.
German-American psychologist who showed that picturing a goal can sap the drive to reach it. She then built a four-step fix.
American marketing consultant whose 1991 book Crossing the Chasm named the most-cited failure mode in how new things spread.
American economist and psychologist, one of the founders of behavioural economics.
British essayist, novelist, and journalist
Behavioural scientist at UCLA Anderson; the leading researcher on how we relate to our future selves.
The most systematic thinker of Chinese Legalism. He argued that good government rests not on the virtue of rulers but on clear law, reliable enforcement, and honest incentives. His collected writings, the Han Feizi, became a working manual of statecraft.
German-American political theorist who argued that who a person is becomes visible only through action — and through the stories others tell of it.
Management theorist at McGill who watched what managers actually do. He found the textbook almost entirely wrong.
Harvard developmental psychologist; author of the foundational academic study of how leaders use story.
The political scientist who explained why grand plans imposed from above keep failing the same way.
Author of <i>Atomic Habits</i>
One of the founders of modern organisation theory; the scholar who explained how organisations remember and why success traps them.
The social psychologist who showed that writing a hard experience into a coherent story measurably improves health.
Two psychologists who showed that people changing a behaviour do not all sit at the same point. Readiness moves through stages, and help has to match the stage.
American political scientist whose 1989 study of how government agencies behave is the most useful single account of large bureaucracies.
MIT researchers who named and codified <em>lean</em>, carrying Toyota's production system into Western practice.
Self-taught writer on cities and institutions who showed that the moral codes of government and of business are two different things.
American engineer who founded system dynamics, the modelling of feedback, stocks, and flows in human systems.
Stanford organisational theorist who studies power inside organisations. He looks at how it is won, used, and resisted.
American psychologist who led the cognitive revolution and put storytelling back at the centre of how the mind makes sense of the world.
American paediatrician whose wry 1975 book on why systems fail gave the field one of its most durable laws.
Harvard Business School professor and the most-cited modern writer on leading organisational change.
Stanford sociologists who showed that organisations keep formal structures alive to look right to outsiders, not to do the work.
American industrial engineer who spent over a decade inside Toyota. He wrote the clearest account we have of how culture actually changes. It changes when people change what they do, not what they believe.
American mythologist who found one deep story shared across the world’s myths — the hero’s journey — and made it the best-known account of narrative shape in modern Western culture.
American anthropologist whose 1996 ethnography of Xerox copier technicians showed that real work always exceeds the documented procedure. The gap is held together by storytelling.
American organisational psychologist. He showed that people in organisations act first and make sense of it after, and that the sense they make takes the form of a story.
Founding author of the Arthashastra, the ancient world’s most complete manual for running a state. It carries the first sustained treatment of how to keep officials honest.
Founder of modern social psychology and of the field of organisational change.
A novelist's sketch of the shapes stories take, confirmed half a century later by a lab that measured 1,327 of them.
Harvard legal scholar who named the four forces that regulate any behaviour, and showed that design has quietly become the strongest of them.
Founding prime minister of Singapore; the architect of a state built, against the odds, on merit and an incorruptible civil service.
Engineer at the University of Virginia who showed, experimentally, that people reach for adding and overlook taking away.
American sociologist whose work showed how the shape of a social network governs what spreads through it.
Veteran community organiser turned Harvard scholar of leadership, organising, and the public story that moves people to act.
German sociologist and a founder of the discipline. He gave the modern world its account of what bureaucracy is and why it spreads.
The two authors of business process reengineering. They launched the clean-sheet redesign movement that ruled corporate change for a decade. Then it became the most fully documented failure in management.
Hungarian-British chemist-turned-philosopher who named the knowledge a skilled person has but cannot put into words.
The two clinicians who built narrative therapy — the practice of treating a person's problem as a story that can be separated from them and re-written.
French sociologist of organisations; the sharpest twentieth-century account of why bureaucracies defeat themselves.
Hungarian-American psychologist who named flow, the absorbed state where a hard task becomes its own reward. He co-founded positive psychology.
American engineer who found what made Toyota different. Not its tools, but two practised routines.
Florentine diplomat and civil servant who founded the Western tradition of seeing politics as it is, not as it should be.
American sociologist whose 1992 study showed that know-how, not awareness, paces the adoption of a new technology.
Two American sociologists. Their 1983 paper explained why competing firms in the same industry end up looking alike, and why their worst shared routines are the hardest to remove.
Sociologists who found, by counting, that mass media rarely changes minds on its own. It reaches a few attentive people who then pass a digested version to everyone else through ordinary conversation.
German social psychologist whose “implementation intention” turns a wish into a reliable behaviour. You name when and where it will happen.
MIT systems scientist who carried system dynamics out of the lab and into the everyday language of management.
French sociologist who explained how social structures get carried inside people — and reproduced through everyday practice.
French literary critic and anthropologist who argued that we do not choose our desires — we catch them from each other.
Organisation-development pioneers who put the field’s most widely used change formula into print.
British evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme.” His idea is that culture spreads and evolves the way genes do.
The economists who founded evolutionary economics and named the routine as the basic unit of how a firm behaves.
An economist and a legal scholar whose 2008 book Nudge showed that the way a choice is arranged quietly shapes what people pick.
American journalist and biographer; the closest thing the study of power has to a modern chronicler.
American social psychologist whose work codified the science of influence and persuasion.
American writer whose books gather the old literature of power and strategy into a modern, usable form.
Harvard developmental psychologists who explained why capable, willing people still fail to change. They also built a method to free them.
American political scientist who gave the modern world the idea of social capital.
The Harvard teacher who named the kind of change that asks people to give something up. He also named why leading it is dangerous.
American sociologist who showed that a group changes character at certain proportions. Below a threshold, a lone minority is treated as a symbol, not a person.
An economist and a psychologist who showed that scarcity itself — of money, time, or anything — taxes the mind and shrinks the attention left for everything else.
American social psychologist at Columbia Business School whose work mapped when more choice helps and when it hurts.
British cybernetician who founded the study of how to run organisations as living systems, and gave the field its bluntest diagnostic line.
Former World Bank executive who turned a single story into a method for leading change through stories.
American management scholar whose 1975 paper on the gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually reward is among the most-cited in the field.
The Chinese strategist credited with The Art of War. It is the oldest sustained account of how to act well in a contest you did not choose, with forces you cannot spare, against an opponent you do not control.
A philosophy of self-government, begun in Athens around 300 BCE and carried for five centuries — its enduring core preserved by three Romans who each held a very different position of power.
American economist who showed that the behaviour of a whole population need look nothing like the behaviour of the people in it.
Two researchers, a neuroscientist and a cognitive psychologist. Their separate work, put side by side, is the strongest evidence we have that a story does something to the mind that an argument does not.
The organisational psychologist who gave work motivation its sharpest formula. You act when you believe effort pays off, the payoff comes, and the payoff is worth wanting.
American statistician who taught Japan that quality is built into the system, not policed out of the worker.
American communication theorist; author of the narrative paradigm
The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, whose fifty years of shareholder letters are the clearest first-hand record we have of how a large institution actually behaves.
American social psychologist and the most rigorous living researcher on how habits form — she showed that a habit is built by repeating an action in a stable context, not by willpower.
American consultant and writer on the human experience of change — the grief, disorientation and slow re-forming of identity that a change sets off inside people.
The English playwright whose work maps the human situations of power, ambition and change more fully than any other.