Richard Foster is a senior partner and director of McKinsey & Company. He joined McKinsey in 1973 and has served global clients in more than 50 industry segments but primarily within the medical products, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, consumer products, high technology, and asset management industries.

His current book, Creative Destruction, has been on the Business Week, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal business bestseller lists and was on Amazon's and Harvard Business Review's list of top ten business books for 2001. The book looks at the long-term records of more than a thousand companies and concludes that only companies that change at the pace and scale of the market provide their investors with market-level returns. If top management wants to outperform the market over the long term, they will have to rethink, and reshape, their priorities.

Foster's first book, Innovation, The Attacker's Advantage, was voted one of the five best business books of the year in a Wall Street Journal CEO poll. He has written numerous articles on innovation and business performance for Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal.