Costas Markides

Leading business and strategy speaker Costas Markides is professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School, where he also holds the Robert P. Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership.

Along with Paul Geroski, Markides is the co-author of the groundbreaking Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter & Dominate New Markets, which uses the metaphor of a landscape to describe the business world. The book examines how big, established companies can create radical new markets by acting as "colonists" or "consolidators." Drawing on examples of successful "fast-second" firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, Canon, JVC, Heinz, and others, Markides explains how new markets have the potential to be successful and provides insight on when to make a move into a new market, how to scale up a market, where to position a company in the market, and whether to be a colonist or consolidator.

Markides was named to the "Thinkers 50," a ranking of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world, by The London Times, CNN, Forbes, and The Times of India. In his Harvard Business Review article "To Diversify or Not to Diversify?", he discussed some key questions tied to business diversification, such as whether companies should diversify and how quickly or slowly they should move towards diversification. In his 1999 book All the Right Moves, he explained why successful business strategy should focus on asking (and finding the answers to) three fundamental questions: Who should I target as customers? What products or services should I offer them? And how can I do this in an efficient way?

A native of Cyprus, Costas Markides received his BA and MA in economics from Boston University and his MBA and DBA from the Harvard Business School. His current research interests include the management of diversified businesses and the use of innovation and creativity to achieve strategic breakthroughs.