Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

SNAPSHOT BIO

Named among the 50 most powerful women in the world (Times of London) and the 50 most influential business thinkers in the world (Accenture and Thinker 50), Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a renowned social scientist and writer whose work focuses on the dynamics of organizational leadership, change and confidence. She is an exceptionally gifted orator and one of the world’s leading scholars in business management.

Professor Kanter’s themes, particularly those on leadership of turnarounds and mastering change in turbulent times, are particularly relevant in today’s economic environment.

Professor Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. Her strategic and practical insights have guided leaders of large and small organizations worldwide for over 25 years, through teaching, writing, and direct consultation to major corporations and governments. Former Editor of Harvard Business Review (1989-1992), Professor Kanter received the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Career Award for her scholarly contributions to management knowledge in 2001, and in 2002 was named “Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year” by the World Teleport Association.

A prolific writer, she has authored or co-authored 17 books, which have been translated into 17 languages. Her literary achievements include:

• Her book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End (a New York Times business and #1 BusinessWeek bestseller), which describes the culture and dynamics of high-performance organizations as compared with those in decline, and shows how to lead turnarounds, whether in businesses, hospitals, schools, sports teams, community organizations, or countries.

• Her latest book, SuperCorp:  How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, a manifesto for leadership of sustainable enterprises, was named one of the ten best business books of 2009 by Amazon.com.

• The prizewinning classic, Men & Women of the Corporation (which won the C. Wright Mills award for the year’s best book on social issues), that offered insight into corporate careers and the individual, as well as organizational factors that promote success. A spin-off video, “A Tale of ‘O’: On Being Different,” is among the world’s most widely-used diversity tools, and a related book, Work & Family in the United States, set a policy agenda. In 2001, a coalition of university centers created the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award in her honor for the best research on work/family issues.

• The award-winning book When Giants Learn to Dance, which showed how to master the new terms of competition at the dawn of the global information age.

• World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy, which identified the rise of new business networks and analyzed dilemmas of globalization.

• America the Principled: 6 Opportunities for Becoming a Can-Do Nation Once Again, which provides a new direction for the United States on the cusp of the Presidential election.

• The Change Masters, which was named one of the most influential business books of the 20th century (Financial Times).

Professor Kanter has received 23 honorary doctoral degrees, as well as numerous leadership awards and prizes for her books and articles. Through Goodmeasure Inc., the consulting group she co-founded, she partnered with IBM to apply her leadership tools to non-business sectors. She is also a Senior Advisor for IBM’s Global Citizenship portfolio.

Professor Kanter advises CEOs of large and small companies, has served on numerous business and non-profit boards, and participates in national commissions including the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors. She speaks widely, often sharing the platform with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and CEOs at national and international events, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Before joining the Harvard Business School faculty, she held tenured professorships at Yale University and Brandeis University and was a Fellow at Harvard Law School, simultaneously holding a Guggenheim Fellowship.

She also chairs a Harvard University group that is creating an innovative initiative on advanced leadership to help successful leaders at the top of their professions address national and global problems.