Mickey Butts

I am a business editor, writer, and content strategist who has helped leading thinkers, writers, and organizations bring out the best in their ideas for more than 25 years. Thought leadership has taken the form of books, articles, data visualizations, case studies, white papers, courseware, and strategic plans with wide appeal. 

My writing and reporting have appeared in publications such as Wired, Salon, Portfolio.com, The Economist, The Industry Standard, The Financial Times, The Nation, Food & Wine, Sunset, Parenting, and San Francisco Classical Voice. I have collaborated with leading thinkers to write and edit articles that have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The McKinsey Quarterly, The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Financial Times, Fortune.com, BCG Perspectives, Accenture Research, Deloitte Insights, and Strategy+Business, as well as bestselling business books published by Random House, Harvard Business Review Press, St. Martin’s Press, and Wiley.

Most recently I was editor in chief at Tanium’s Focal Point brand journalism magazine and a senior editor at T Brand Studio of The New York Times, as well as deputy editor at Boston Consulting Group, where I scaled up and coached BCG’s network of 28 high-performing freelance thought-leadership writers and managed the creation of innovative interactive and infographic data visualizations. Previously as a senior writer at BCG, I wrote dozens of high-profile thought-leadership articles and reports on topics such as big data, digital transformation, marketing, pricing, education, and social impact.

I was formerly a part of the launch team and an executive editor of The Industry Standard magazine, assistant managing editor for new media at Time Inc.’s Parenting magazine, and chief content editor for the Jack Welch Management Institute. I have an MBA from Columbia Business School, a master of journalism degree from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Brown University. More information is at my Web site: https://insightcontentlab.com/

info Subjects

General

Business & Finance
Arts & Culture
Education
Food & Drink
Government & Politics
Health & Medicine
Lifestyle
Nature & Environment
Parenting
Science
Technology
Travel

Specialties

Economics, management, leadership, people and organizations, work, social impact, philanthropy, nonprofits, marketing, pricing, AI, cybersecurity, data and analytics, blockchain, digital transformation, healthcare, classical music, wine, careers, investing

notepad Skills

  • Articles
  • Blog posts
  • Books
  • Case studies
  • Communications strategy
  • Conference/meeting coverage
  • Content marketing
  • Copywriting
  • Curriculum
  • Donor communications
  • E-books
  • Editing
  • Essays
  • Feature writing
  • Fundraising appeals
  • Ghostwriting
  • Grant writing
  • Infographics
  • Investigative reporting
  • Marketing personas
  • Media relations
  • News
  • News releases
  • Op-Ed
  • Podcasts (writing)
  • Profiles
  • Project management
  • Publication management
  • Publicity
  • Q&A
  • SEO
  • Scripts
  • Social media
  • White papers
  • Web copy
  • Advertorials
  • Annual reports
  • Brochures
  • Event production
  • Ideation
  • Podcasts (producing)

notepad Writing Credits

Writing and Reporting: Wired, Salon, Portfolio.com, The Economist, The Industry Standard, The Financial Times, The Nation, Food & Wine, Sunset, Parenting, San Francisco Classical Voice
Ghostwriting and Editing: Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The McKinsey Quarterly, The Economist Intelligence Unit, The Financial Times, Fortune.com, BCG Perspectives, Accenture Research, Deloitte Insights, Strategy+Business

notepad Book Credits

Ghostwriting and Substantive Editing

Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future (Harvard Business Review Press)

The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the New World of Work (Harvard Business Review Press)

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers (Crown Business/Random House)

Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (Jossey-Bass/Wiley)

Dead Companies Walking: How a Hedge Fund Manager Finds Opportunity in Unexpected Places (Palgrave Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press)

Strategic Alliances: Three Ways to Make Them Work (Harvard Business Review Press)

Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass/Wiley)

 

star Awards, Honors, Appointments

Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Business Journalism and Economics, Columbia Journalism School
Wiegers Fellowship, a fully paid competitive scholarship for business journalists to complete an MBA at Columbia Business School
Past President, Alumni Association of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Graduate of the Knight Digital Media Fellowship

Selected Work

As author, unless indicated otherwise.

Jack Welch, Move Over

A review oif Jim Collins’s Good to Great.

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Deny Until We Die

Agent Orange killed my father. Did it also kill my sisters? Like a detective, I set out to discover the truth.

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How Narcissistic Leaders Make Organizations Less Ethical

A narcissist's bad behavior infects their organizational culture even after they're gone.

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Building Capacity for Sustained Collaboration

Foundations helping nonprofits build their capacity to execute sustained collaborations are catalyzing an important shift on the nonprofit landscape and having an outsized impact on the ground.

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Why Technology Matters

This is the first in a series of articles on technology economics.

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Oh Behave

Why do we spend more when we have less to spend? Behavioral economists can explain.

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The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers

The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction

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Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future

From the blockchain, to the metaverse, to emotional AI, digital technologies are rapidly advancing at a time when enterprises face more pressure than ever to innovate to gain a competitive advantage. Human behaviors and intelligence are informing the design of new machines, and everything we knew about innovation and strategy is being turned upside down.

Read

The Corporate Lattice

The corporate ladder has been the prevailing model for how companies manage their work and their people since the beginning of the industrial revolution a century ago. The ladder represents an inflexible view in which prestige, rewards, access to information, influence, and power are tied to the rung one occupies. The problem is, the authors argue, we no longer live in the industrial age.

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Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits

An innovative guide to how great nonprofits achieve extraordinary social impact. What makes great nonprofits great? Authors Crutchfield and McLeod Grant searched for the answer over several years, employing a rigorous research methodology which derived from books on for-profits like Built to Last. They studied 12 nonprofits that have achieved extraordinary levels of impact—from Habitat for Humanity to the Heritage Foundation—and distilled six counterintuitive practices that these organizations use to change the world. 

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