Costas Markides is best known for asking the strategic questions most organisations avoid and insisting they answer them before it’s too late.

A Professor of Strategy at London Business School and one of the world’s most respected thinkers on strategic innovation, Costas has spent decades studying why successful organisations fail, not through incompetence, but through good management applied to the wrong assumptions. His work focuses on how leaders make fundamental choices about where to compete, how to compete, and when to change, long before performance metrics begin to flash red.

Costas challenges the idea that best practice is universally transferable, he examines why disruption so often blinds incumbents, how business models conflict inside organisations, and why growth initiatives collapse when leaders confuse operational excellence with strategic renewal.

As the author of seminal works including Game-Changing Strategies, Strategic Innovation, and Organising for the New Economy, Costas equips leaders to think rigorously about innovation without chasing every trend and to redesign strategy without destroying what already works.