András Tilcsik

Due to their incredible complexity, our modern systems—from healthcare to travel, finance to media—are primed for failure. And things are only getting worse. In his National Business Book Award-winning Meltdown, András TilCsik offers a timely remedy. Not only a convincing diagnosis of why complexity creates failure in systems, it’s a practical guidebook to preventing the next disaster—before it strikes.

Meltdown is one of the stand-out business books of the decade.Stuart Crainer and Des Dearler, Founders, Thinkers50

András Tilcsik is one of the world’s Top 40 Professors Under 40, and one of thirty management thinkers most likely to shape the future of organizations. He is also co-author of Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It —a bold and clear-sighted sourcebook for anyone seeking to grasp how systems are prone to failure, and how we can prevent collapses of all sizes before they occur. An Associate Professor at the Rotman School of Management, Tilcsik developed and teaches the award-winning course “Catastrophic Failure in Organizations” (The United Nations calls it the best course on disaster risk management in a business school.)

In his teaching—and throughout Meltdown—he explains the paradox of progress: that as modern society demands more capable systems, they become more complex by necessity. From nuclear energy to aerospace engineering, Wall Street economics to the politics of social media, we live entangled in staggering complexity—which means that tiny mistakes or simple accidents can lead to devastating catastrophes. Co-written with Chris Clearfield, Meltdown accomplishes three vital things: it explains why complexity leads to failure, reveals the common factors between disasters large and small, and sets down a series of practical strategies that corporations, governments, and individuals can use to keep themselves safe. As a proposal, Meltdown received the McKinsey & Company Bracken Bower Prize for “best business proposal by authors under 35.” Upon publication, it was named a Best Business Book of the Year by the Financial Times, took home the National Business Book Award, and was dubbed “one of the stand-out business book of the decade” by Thinkers50 founders Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove, who awarded the Tilscik and Clearfield with the prestigious Thinkers 50 Strategy Award.

One of Canadian Business’s Change Agents, Tilcsik holds the Canada Research Chair in Strategy, Organizations, and Society. He is also the chief sociologist of the Creative Destruction Lab, one of the world’s fastest-growing startup accelerators. Tilscik has received several awards from the American Sociological Association, and his research has been cited to committees of the U.S. Congress and covered in media outlets like The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Slate, and Freakonomics Radio.

Tilscik has spoken at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, the Wharton School, the World Bank, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Rotman Graduate Business Council, and many other institutions. As a Fellow of the Michael Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship, Tilscik is also studying corporate practices that reduce the risk and impact of environmental disasters. He is a graduate of Harvard University (Ph.D., A.M., and A.B.) and the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, where he also served as an Auxiliary Coastguard in Her Majesty’s Coastguard Rescue Service.