Bill Taylor thinks that business schools can learn a lot from the most recent global economic crisis—as long as they work to learn the right lessons. Taylor, an entrepreneur, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and best-selling author, will offer provocative answers to some of the most urgent challenges in businessduring his keynote talk at GMAC’s 2010 MBA Leadership Conference. The meeting, cosponsored by the MBA Roundtable, takes place January 27-29, 2010, in Atlanta. Taylor shared some of his ideas in a recent telephone interview.

Q: Your forthcoming book is titled Practically Radical: Strategies to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry and Recharge Yourself. Are you suggesting that organizations and individuals need to be different on purpose?

A. Absolutely. No matter what the setting, I find the most effective leaders and change agents always start with a distinctive point of view and authentic sense of purpose that drive the strategies, tactics, and practices that they develop. In a period of great change, which is obviously what we are going through now, who you are as a person and what you believe in as a person and as an organization really are the starting points for everything that follows.

Q. The topic of your session at the GMAC meeting is “A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” If we assume that the current economic downturn is such a crisis, are people drawing the right or the wrong lessons from it?

A. My big concern is that too many leaders and organizations are drawing the wrong lessons—that they are becoming conservative and risk averse, and choosing to be suspicious of and resist innovation rather than embrace it as a way forward. If you look back in history, you see that some of the most game-changing innovations in business have come during periods of maximum peril. The challenge for leaders everywhere is to ask whether we are going to use this period of turmoil to develop closer connections to our customers, to get more creativity and energy from our people, and to get greater separation between us and our rivals.