Business strategist, advisor, author and speaker.
Shaping the Future of Business Strategy
Founder and past chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, and a three-time TED speaker with over 35 years of experience advising global leadership teams, Martin helps leaders peek around corners, harness serendipity, and turn external forces into internal opportunities.
Many leaders are deeply creative but organizationally trapped. When speaking to such groups, pressing the right buttons for seriousness and humor will bring us to interesting places where curiosity, creativity and strategy come together.
Featured work.
Featured Book
Featured Book
Like: The Button That Changed the World
A riveting, insider’s look at the creation and evolution of the like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, and culture—and its profound impact on modern human interaction.
“…an entertaining new book by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson on the origins of the “like” button.” — The Economist
Over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How could something that came out of nowhere become so ubiquitous—and even so addictive? How did this seemingly ordinary social media icon go from such a small and unassuming invention to something so intuitive and universally understood that it has scaled well beyond its original intent?
This is the story of the like button and how it changed our lives. In Like, bestselling author and renowned strategy expert Martin Reeves and coauthor Bob Goodson—Silicon Valley veteran and one of the originators of the like button—take readers on a quest to uncover the origins of the thumbs-up gesture, how it became an icon on social media, and what’s behind its power.
Through insights from key players, including the founders of Yelp, PayPal, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and FriendFeed, you’ll hear firsthand the disorderly, serendipitous process from which the like button was born. It’s a story that starts with a simple thumbs-up cartoon but ends up with surprises and new mysteries at every turn, some of them as deep as anthropological history and others as speculative as the AI-charged future.
But this is much more than the origin story of the like button. Drawing on business and innovation theory, evolutionary biology, social psychology, neuroscience, and other human-centered disciplines, this deeply researched book offers smart and unexpected insights into how this little icon changed our world—and all of us in the process.
Featured Conversation
Featured Conversation
#147—Martin Reeves: The Like Button That Changed the World
The “like” button wasn’t supposed to change the world.
It started as a few lines of JavaScript code, born from cultural quirks and accidental discoveries. Yet this simple feature reshaped entire business models and rewired human behavior.
In our latest Outthinkers podcast, we speak with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute and author of “Like: The Button That Changed the World.”
Martin’s research reveals a counterintuitive truth about innovation: breakthrough ideas rarely emerge from lone geniuses having eureka moments. Instead, they bubble up from messy communities, chance encounters, and unexpected recombinations of existing concepts.
The “like” button exemplifies this perfectly.
What began as a simple feedback mechanism became the foundation for attention economies, algorithmic curation, and social validation systems that extend far beyond social media.
For strategists, this episode offers a practical lens for recognizing serendipitous innovation within organizations.
The challenge isn’t manufacturing breakthrough moments—it’s creating conditions that allow unexpected connections to flourish.
Featured Article
Featured Article
Like & Other Drugs
About Martin
A leading thinker, author, and speaker on strategy and innovation, Martin helps organizations adapt to uncertainty and compete in today’s tech-heavy world. He is the founder of the BCG Henderson Institute, a three-time TED speaker, author of Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (2015), The Imagination Machine (2021), and Like: The Button That Changed the World (2025), as well as editor of the Inspiring the Next Game series (2022–2023).
books
Management Pieces
Articles
Upcoming.
Featured Book
Upcoming Book
Your Life Needs a Strategy (February 2027
We’re drawn to stories of people who succeed against the odds. But what if those stories aren’t just inspiring? What if they reveal a strategy?
In Your Life Needs a Strategy, Martin Reeves, Christian Stadler, Julia Hautz, and Hamad Buamim argue that extraordinary success is rarely the product of talent or effort alone–and it’s never just luck. It comes from knowing how to work with uncertainty: spotting opportunities others miss, experimenting when outcomes are unclear, influencing situations that seem fixed, and creating possibilities that didn’t exist before.
At the heart of the book is a simple but powerful idea: you can’t control the future, but you can shape the conditions that determine your odds. By choosing the right strategy for the environment you’re in–and knowing when to shift–you gain leverage over outcomes that once felt random.
Success doesn’t go to the smartest or the hardest working. It goes to those who understand how success actually happens in complex systems. Your Life Needs a Strategy is a practical guide for anyone who wants to increase their visibility, influence, and impact by thinking more strategically about where to play, how to move, and when to change course.
Featured Book
Upcoming Book
Georesilience (2027)
Geopolitics and Strategy (provisional) brings together the expertise of Nikolaus Lang, Senior Partner and Managing Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) with deep experience in global strategy and geopolitical risk, and Martin Reeves, Former Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute and a globally recognized authority on strategy. Together, they examine how shifting geopolitical dynamics are reshaping the foundations of business strategy and decision-making.
Forthcoming in 2027 from Harvard Business Press, the work offers a forward-looking framework for leaders navigating an increasingly complex, fragmented, and politically charged global environment.
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