Background
Hartung was born in Watchhorn, Oklahoma.
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Adam Hartung
Edit ProfileEducation
He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration, suma cum laude, Departmental Honors at Wichita State University (1979), and an Master of Business Administration with Distinction at Harvard Business School (1982).
Career
He is best known for his Leadership column in Forbes. Hartung is the author of Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition published in 2008 by FT Press. Hartung began his career as an entrepreneur, selling the first general-purpose computing platform to use the 8080 microprocessor when he was an undergraduate.
Today, he writes, consults and speaks worldwide.
Hartung’s book, Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition, aims to help leaders and managers create evergreen organizations that produce above-average returns. In this book, Hartung introduced the idea of the “status quo police” to describe the functions or departments in a company that work to maintain “the success formula” which has made the company successful.
He used this idea in his Forbes columns. In a May 2012 column in Forbes magazine, Hartung described Steve Ballmer, then Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, as "the worst Chief Executive Officer of a large publicly traded American company", Hartung wrote that he had "steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets)".
He has also been a strategist with the Boston Consulting Group, and an executive with Pepsi Cola and DuPont in the areas of strategic planning and business development.
Hartung is a columnist for Forbes magazine, focusing on leadership and business growth. “Don"t try to think outside the box, get outside the box, then think!” recognizes the difficulty of creating innovative ideas when confined by the limits of the current situation or company.
