About Mauro Guillen
From Mauro Guillen’s website:
Mauro F. Guillén is one of the most original thinkers at the Wharton School, where he holds the Zandman Professorship in International Management and teaches in its flagship Advanced Management Program and many other courses for executives, MBAs, and undergraduates. An expert on global market trends, he is a sought-after speaker and consultant. He combines his training as a sociologist at Yale and as a business economist in his native Spain to methodically identify and quantify the most promising opportunities at the intersection of demographic, economic, and technological developments.
Mauro F. Guillén’s online classes on Coursera and edX have attracted over 100,000 participants from around the world. He has won multiple teaching awards at Wharton, where his presentation on global market trends has become a permanent feature of over fifty executive education programs annually.
As Director of the Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies between 2007 and 2019 he revolutionized the world’s premier graduate international program combining the Wharton MBA with a degree in International Studies by launching innovative learning experiences such as the Global Knowledge Lab, the Lauder Intercultural Ventures, and the first Africa-focused academic program at a major business school. These contributions earned him the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award.
His research, teaching, and speaking incorporates both numerical assessments of trends and illuminating examples from business, politics, and everyday life. He shows in accessible terms that one can accurately forecast trends by systematically following the babies and following the money into the future.
His research has earned him many distinctions, including Fulgright, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim fellowships, a membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and prizes from the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, the Social Science History Association, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. He is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association and the Macro Organizational Behavior Society.
His research, op-eds, and commentary have been featured in numerous outlets, from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to The Economist, and the Financial Times. He has appeared on radio and TV shows such as NPR’s Marketplace and Radio Times, CNBC’s Mad Money and Squawk Box, and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. He is a seasoned public speaker at conferences, conventions, forums, and corporate events organized by industry associations and Fortune 500 companies. He serves or has served on several advisory groups, boards of directors, and nonprofit boards of trustees.
The Platform Paradox: How Digital Businesses Succeed in an Ever-Changing Global Marketplace
In The Platform Paradox: How Digital Businesses Succeed in an Ever-Changing Global Marketplace, Wharton professor Mauro F. Guillén highlights a key incongruity in this new world. Most platforms considered to be successful have triumphed in only some, rather than all, parts of the world. There are very few truly global digital platforms.
In more than three decades of studying multinational firms, Guillén has found they often misunderstand key aspects of what it takes to succeed globally, from culture and institutions to local competitive dynamics and pursuing markets in a logical sequence. Seeing multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon flounder in certain markets has led Guillén to research what it takes to create a successful global strategy.
In The Platform Paradox, Guillén details:
- How the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization and forced companies like Airbnb to pivot and adapt;
- How platforms like Tinder and Uber have used local advantages to grow rapidly in different countries;
- How traditional companies have transformed themselves into digital platforms, like Lego undertaking a digital revolution to emerge from bankruptcy and become the “Apple of toys”; and
- The possibilities and limits to global expansion, as illustrated by companies like Zoom and Skype.
In The Platform Paradox, Guillén offers an integrated framework for these platforms to identify and implement a digital platform strategy on a truly global scale.
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