Hungarian Researcher Wins Thinkers50 Award

Hungarian business researcher András Tilcsik is the recipient of the Strategy category of this year's Thinkers50 Awards dubbed by the Financial Times as 'the Oscars of Management Thinking'. Tilcsik was recognized for his book 'Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It', written together with American Chris Clearfield.

András Tilcsik is an associate professor of strategic management and holds the Canada Research Chair in Strategy, Organizations, and Society at the Rotman School of Management in Toronoto, Canada. He is also a faculty fellow at the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship. His research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Administrative Science Quarterly.

In the book, Clearfield and Tilcsik use real-life examples to reveal the errors in thinking, perception, and system design that lie behind both our everyday errors and disasters like the Fukushima nuclear accident. But most crucially, Meltdown is about finding solutions, as one of the book reviews puts it. It reveals why ugly designs make us safer, how a five-minute exercise can prevent billion-dollar catastrophes, why teams with fewer experts are better at managing risk, and why diversity is one of our best safeguards against failure. The result is an eye-opening and empowering book – one that will change the way you see our complex world and your own place within it.

Thinkers50 — the first-ever global ranking of management thinkers — was created in 2001 by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove. A new ranking has been announced every two years since, and each is the culmination of an intensive Thinkers50 campaign to identify the very best management thinking in the world.

The Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards were introduced in 2011 as a way to recognize and celebrate business and management thinkers in a number of specific categories. The winners have been announced at the biennial Awards Gala in London this week.