Kevin Maney

Kevin Maney is a bestselling author, award-winning columnist, and founding partner at Category Design Advisors (CDA). His critically-acclaimed book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, introduced business to the idea of category design and has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. As a founding partner of CDA, Maney has helped leadership teams at hundreds of companies all over the world focus their strategic thinking through category design. Maney’s most recent book is his first novel, Red Bottom Line. Set in Moscow in 1991, it’s based on his reporting as a journalist covering the breakup of the Soviet Union. Maney’s most recent business book is Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation, co-authored with Hemant Taneja, managing director of VC firm General Catalyst. Maney and Taneja also collaborated on UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, out in 2021, and Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future. They are now at work on a fourth book. Maney co-authored, with TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive, The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future...Just Enough. Merging brain science and computer science, it was a 2011 New York Times bestseller, and anticipated much of the conversation we’re now having about artificial intelligence. Maney also co-wrote Making the World Work Better, which marked IBM’s centennial in 2001. More than 600,000 copies are in print in a dozen languages. His other books include Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't, The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM and Megamedia Shakeout. Maney has been a contributor to Newsweek, Fortune, The Atlantic, Fast Company, CNN and ABC News, among other media outlets. He was a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio during its brief run from 2007 to 2009. For 22 years, Maney was a columnist, editor and reporter at USA Today. He’s appeared frequently on television and radio, including CBS Sunday Morning and NPR, and lectures at conferences and universities, including New York University, UNC in Chapel Hill, and his alma mater, Rutgers. Kevin lives in New York, and plays music with other New York rockers in a band called Total Blam Blam.