The Thinkers50 Best New Management Books of 2026

Recognized for innovation, disruption, courage, and a new way to think about success

Each year, Thinkers50, described by the Financial Times as the “Oscars of management thinking”, names the books most worth reading by leaders trying to make sense of the moment. The 2026 list, announced on May 4, 2026, recognizes titles that combine readability, rigor, and relevance: ideas accessible enough to act on, well-researched enough to trust, and timely enough to matter.

We’re proud that six speakers and advisors represented by Stern Strategy Group are among the authors honored this year, with four books on the list:

• Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild for Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation
• Scott D. Anthony for Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World
• Ruchika T. Malhotra for Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success
• Ranjay Gulati for How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage

Together, the four books trace a clear throughline. Leadership today is being tested by uncertainty, disruption, and the constant pressure to perform. The authors below offer different and complementary answers for the leaders navigating it.

Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild – Genius at Scale

Most leaders know that continuous innovation is essential. Far fewer know how to move from generating bold ideas to scaling them across complex organizations and industries.

In Genius at Scale, Harvard Business School professor Linda A. Hill and co-authors Emily Tedards and Jason Wild draw on more than a decade of global research to show that breakthrough innovation isn’t a solo act, it’s a collective one. The book introduces the leadership roles required to turn promising ideas into systemic change, and the practices that distinguish organizations that scale innovation from those that stall.

Hill is Chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School and one of the world’s foremost experts on leadership and diversity-driven innovation, ranked by Thinkers50 among the top ten management thinkers globally. Tedards is a researcher in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. Wild is a former Microsoft executive and worldwide expert on digital transformation and customer-centric growth. Together, they make a research-grounded case that the same leadership capabilities that drive innovation also fuel inclusion, agility, and resilience.

Hear them speak on: scaling innovation, collective genius, AI-era leadership, building cultures of inclusion and experimentation.

Scott D. Anthony – Epic Disruptions

Disruption is one of the most overused words in business, and one of the most misunderstood. In Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Scott D. Anthony revisits the inventions that rewrote the rules, from gunpowder and the printing press to the assembly line, fast food, the iPhone, and generative AI. He extracts what they tell us about the disruptions unfolding now.

His central insight: real innovation rarely arrives overnight. It compounds through persistence, vision, and a willingness to lead through “the messy middle” between before and after. Anthony, a longtime collaborator of the late Clayton Christensen and former global managing partner at Innosight, has been ranked five times among the most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 and was the recipient of the 2017 Innovation Award.

For leaders facing AI-driven change in their industries, Epic Disruptions is both a history lesson and a field guide.

Hear him speak on: navigating disruptive change, the AI era, dual transformation, leading through uncertainty.

Ruchika T. Malhotra – Uncompete

Conventional wisdom tells us competition makes us better, that it drives motivation, sharpens performance, and fuels innovation. Ruchika T. Malhotra argues the opposite is often closer to the truth.

In Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success, the award-winning inclusion strategist makes a research-backed case that constant competition produces burnout, scarcity thinking, and broken trust, and that collaboration, not competition, is what actually drives the breakthroughs leaders are chasing. Drawing on her work with corporations as a sought-after strategist and on interviews with leaders across sectors, Malhotra offers a framework for building cultures of collaboration, solidarity, and psychological safety.

Malhotra is the founder and CEO of Candour, a Thinkers50 Radar honoree, and the bestselling author of Inclusion on Purpose, the MIT Press’s top-selling book of 2022. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review and The New York Times, and her HBR article “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” has been read more than a million times.

Hear her speak on: collaboration over competition, inclusive leadership, psychological safety, building cultures of belonging.

Ranjay Gulati – How to Be Bold

In a moment defined by uncertainty, many organizations retreat, playing not to lose rather than striving to win. Ranjay Gulati, the Harvard Business School professor and longtime Stern speaker, argues that the answer isn’t bigger risk appetites or louder leadership. It’s everyday courage, practiced as a habit.

How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage draws on psychology, neuroscience, history, and more than 200 real-world stories Gulati collected over twelve years. His “9 C’s” framework reframes courage as a learnable practice, something cultivated in the small, daily moments of a leader’s work, not reserved for the dramatic ones. Bravery, he writes, is not the absence of fear but the mastery of it.

Gulati was named among the top ten management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 in 2025 and is the recipient of the 2024 CK Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice. He is the author of more than twenty Harvard Business Review articles and the bestselling Deep Purpose.

Hear him speak on: courage as a leadership practice, deep purpose, resilience, leading through uncertainty.

Why this matters now

The leaders we work with are navigating compounding uncertainty: AI reshaping industries, workforces in transition, expectations of leadership rising on every front. The four books recognized this year offer something more durable than tactics. They offer frameworks for thinking about innovation, disruption, success, and courage, that hold up under pressure.

We’re proud to represent these authors and to bring their ideas to the stages, boardrooms, and leadership teams that need them most.

To explore booking Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, Jason Wild, Scott D. Anthony, Ruchika T. Malhotra, or Ranjay Gulati for an upcoming event or advisory engagement, please reach out at inquiries@sternstrategy.com or +1 908-276-4344.