Donald Sull

Simple Rules, with Kathleen Eisenhardt, argues that in genuinely complicated situations a handful of hard rules beats a detailed plan, and it works the case through emergency medicine, burglary and how a colony of insects picks a nest. Sull teaches at MIT and taught before that at Harvard and London Business School, and the research is mostly about why strategies fail in execution rather than in design. He also gave a name to active inertia, which is the tendency of a successful company facing a changed world to respond by doing more of whatever used to work.