Robert B. Reich

Robert B. Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio’s "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people.
In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Vaclev Havel Foundation Prize, by the former Czech president, for his pioneering work in economic and social thought. In 2005, his play, Public Exposure, broke box office records at its world premiere on Cape Cod.

As the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor, Reich implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, led a national fight against sweatshops in the U.S. and illegal child labor around the world, headed the administration’s successful effort to raise the minimum wage, secured worker’s pensions, and launched job-training programs, one-stop career centers, and school-to-work initiatives. Under his leadership, the Department of Labor won more than 30 awards for innovation. A 1996 poll of cabinet experts conducted by the Hearst newspapers rated him the most effective cabinet secretary during the Clinton administration.
Reich has been a member of the faculties of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and of Brandeis University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Tom Peters

Fortune called Tom Peters the "Ur-guru" of management, and compares him to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and H.L. Mencken. The Economist tagged him the Uber-guru; and BusinessWeek's take on his "unconventional views" led them to label Peters "business's best friend and worst nightmare." In 2004, the Bloomsbury Press book Movers and Shakers: The 100 Most Influential Figures in Modern Business reviewed the historical contributions of pathbreaking management thinkers and practitioners, from Machiavelli and JP Morgan to Tom and Jack Welch. The summary entry on Tom's impact:
"Tom Peters has probably done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management from the confines of boardrooms, academia, and consultancies to a broader, worldwide audience, where it has become the staple diet of the media and managers alike. Peter Drucker has written more and his ideas have withstood a longer test of time, but it is Peters—as consultant, writer, columnist, seminar lecturer, and stage performer—whose energy, style, influence, and ideas have shaped new management thinking."
When Tom & Bob Waterman wrote In Search of Excellence 25 years ago, they introduced the world of business to the idea and value of Excellence per se as an inspiring and profitable aspiration—at a time when America's competitiveness was under fullblown assault. The world and management practice have changed in the years following Search, and although the companies profiled have adapted remarkably well along the way, the challenges today are more daunting than ever. Excellence as a way of life and an unmatchable competitive advantage has never been more important
In 1999, Search was honored by NPR as one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century"—and ranked as the "greatest business book of all time" in a 2002 poll by Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing. Tom followed Search with over a dozen additional international bestsellers. Among them: A Passion for Excellence (1985, with Nancy Austin); Thriving on Chaos (1987); Liberation Management (1992: acclaimed as the "Management Book of the Decade" for the '90s); the millennium troika in 1999 on Reinventing Work in the face of new global competition (The Brand You50, The Project50, and The Professional Service Firm50); and, in 2003, the provocative, colorful Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. He is currently working on a book that renews and strengthens his clarion call for Excellence.
Two Tom Peters biographies have been published: Corporate Man to Corporate Skunk: The Tom Peters Phenomenon and Tom Peters: The Bestselling Prophet of the Management Revolution (part of a four-book series of business biographies on Peters, Bill Gates, Peter Drucker, and Warren Buffet). In a 2002 in-depth analytic study, Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change scored Peters 2nd among the top 50 "Business Intellectuals."
Tom, who is widely credited with almost single-handedly launching the "management guru industry," now billions of dollars in size, writes, reflects, and then presents some 60 or so major seminars each year, more than half outside the U.S. He estimates that since 1978, when the work on Search began, he's given about 2,500 speeches, flown 5,000,000+ miles, spoken before 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 people, and presented in 47 states and 63 countries. Since 2004, Tom also has devoted significant energy to his award-winning (a “Top 500” designation) blog—www.tompeters.com.
Leadership guru Warren Bennis, the only person close to both Tom and the late Peter Drucker, told a reporter, "If Peter Drucker invented modern management, Tom Peters vivified it." In fact, as even Tom's book titles indicate, his passion is passion: Destruction & Re-imaginings ... liberating talent for a hypercompetitive world ... the Herculean task of sustaining Entrepreneurial Excellence. Among Tom’s newer passions & provocations are: Women-as-Leaders particularly suited for these times; the supreme role of Design in differentiation; gaining advantage in the enormous, underserved market represented by Women (controllers of 3/4 of the world’s wealth) and the burgeoning, financially potent Boomer-Geezer population. Now, Tom is once again pursuing, with characteristic determination ... Excellence, variety 2007. "There is no higher aim," he says, "than the relentless pursuit of Excellence. On the 25th anniversary of our book, I am re-dedicating myself to the search that began in 1982. That is: The search continues ..."
Born in Baltimore in 1942 with lacrosse stick in his hands, and residing in Silicon Valley from 1970–2000, Tom now lives on a 1,600-acre working farm in Vermont with his wife, the artist and entrepreneur Susan Sargent. He is a civil engineering graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.) and earned an MBA and Ph.D. at Stanford; he holds honorary doctorates from several institutions, including the University of San Francisco and, oddly, the State University of Management in Moscow. In the U.S. Navy from 1966–1970, he made two deployments to Vietnam (as a Navy Seabee) and "survived a tour in the Pentagon." He was a White House drug-abuse advisor in 1973–74, and then worked at McKinsey & Co. from 1974–1981, becoming a Partner and Organization Effectiveness practice leader in 1979.

Michael E. Porter

Michael E. Porter

Biography
Michael E. Porter is a leading authority on competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions, and the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care, the environment, and corporate responsibility.
He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.
Professor Porter is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, as has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness.
He is the author of 17 books and over 125 articles. He received a B.S.E. with high honors in aerospace and mechanical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He received an M.B.A. with high distinction in 1971 from the Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar, and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1973.
Teaching
Professor Porter's ideas are the foundation for courses on strategy and competitiveness, and his work is taught at virtually every business school in the world.
At Harvard, Professor Porter’s course, Microeconomics of Competitiveness, is a graduate course open to students from across the university. It is also taught in partnership with more than 80 other universities from every continent using curriculum, video content and instructor support developed at Harvard.
Professor Porter developed and chairs the New CEO Workshop, a Harvard Business School program for newly appointed CEOs of the world’s largest and more complex corporations. Held twice each year by invitation only, the workshop focuses on the challenges facing new CEOs in assuming leadership. His Harvard Business Review article with Jay Lorsch and Nitin Nohria, ‘Seven Surprises for New CEOs’ (October 2004), describes some of the learning from this ongoing body of work.
Professor Porter speaks widely on strategy, competitiveness, health care delivery, related subjects to business, government, non-profit, and philanthropic leaders.

Research

Strategy

Professor Porter’s core field is competitive strategy, which remains a major focus of his research. His book, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, is in its 63rd printing and has been translated into 19 languages. His second major strategy book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, was published in 1985 and is in its 38th printing. His book On Competition (1998) includes a series of articles on strategy and competition, including the award-winning Harvard Business Review article 'What is Strategy?', published in 1996. An updated version of his article, 'The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy,' was published in early 2008. Professor Porter’s next major book on strategy is in process.

Competitiveness of Nations and Regions

Professor Porter's 1990 book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, presents a new theory of how nations and regions compete and their sources of economic prosperity. Motivated by his appointment by President Ronald Reagan to the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the book has guided economic policy in countless nations and regions. Subsequent articles have expanded on the concept of clusters (geographic concentrations of related industries that occur in particular fields) and other aspects of the theory.
National Competitiveness. Professor Porter has published books about national competitiveness on New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan. His book Can Japan Compete? (2000) challenged long-held views about the Japanese economic miracle.
Professor Porter chairs the Global Competitiveness Report, an annual ranking of the competitiveness and growth prospects of more than 120 countries published by the World Economic Forum.
Clusters. Professor Porter’s ideas on clusters, first introduced in 1990, have given rise to a large body of theory and practice throughout the world. Cluster-based economic development thinking has resulted in many hundreds of public-private cluster initiatives in virtually every country. The article “Clusters and Competition: New Agendas for Companies, Governments, and Institutions” and On Competition (1998) provide a summary.
Regional Competitiveness. Professor Porter extended his work on competitiveness to states, provinces, and other sub-national regions. He led the Clusters of Innovation project which examined five major U.S. regions developing new theory and methodologies. He created the Cluster Mapping Project at Harvard, which provides rich data on the economic geography of U.S. regions and clusters on a special web site. Professor Porter’s methodology is the basis for comprehensive new data on the economic geography of the 27 countries of the European Union. The article ‘The Economic Performance of Regions’ (2003) summarizes some of the important findings from this data as does a new paper, ‘Convergence, Clusters and Economic Performance’ (2006), with Mercedes Delgado and Scott Stern.
Innovation. Professor Porter is co-author (with Professor Scott Stern and others) of a body of work on the sources of innovation in national and regional economies, including The New Challenge to America's Prosperity: Findings from the Innovation Index (1999), 'The Determinants of National Innovative Capacity' (2000), and 'Measuring the 'Ideas' Production Function: Evidence from International Patent Output' (2000).

Competition and Society

Professor Porter's third major body of work has addressed the relationship between competition and society.
Economically Distressed Communities.. Professor Porter offered a new theory of urban economic development, beginning with the Harvard Business Review article 'The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City'. In 1994, he founded The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a non-profit, private-sector organization to catalyze inner-city business development across the country. Professor Porter is Chairman of the ICIC, a national organization that works in cities across America. Related work by Professor Porter has tackled economic development in rural areas.
The Natural Environment. Professor Porter introduced a controversial theory that argued that environmental progress and competitiveness were not inconsistent but complementary, put forth in his Scientific American essay, 'America's Green Strategy', and his article 'Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship' (1995). The “Porter Hypothesis” has been the subject of more than 100 articles and has spawned a rich literature. The theory is now widely accepted and is guiding corporate practice and thinking about regulation.
Philanthropy and Corporate Social Responsibility. Professor Porter has devoted growing attention to philanthropy and the role of corporations in society. His Harvard Business Review article with Mark Kramer, 'Philanthropy's New Agenda: Creating Value' (1999), introduced a new framework for developing strategy in foundations and other philanthropic organizations.
His Harvard Business Review article, 'The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy' (2002), focused on how corporations can create more social benefit in their philanthropy. His Harvard Business Review article with Mark Kramer, 'Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility' (2006), tackles the strategic underpinnings of corporate social responsibility.
With Mark Kramer, Professor Porter co-founded the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating concepts and measurement tools to improve foundation performance. He also co-founded FSG-Social Impact Advisors, an international non-profit firm that provides advice and innovative ideas about social strategy to foundations, corporations, and social service organizations.

Health Care Delivery

Since 2001, Professor Porter has devoted considerable attention to competition in the health care system, with a focus on improving health care delivery. His work with Professor Elizabeth Teisberg, including the book Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), is influencing thinking and practice not only in the United States but numerous other countries. Curriculum growing out of this research is being taught at Harvard and elsewhere.

Advisor and Civic Organizations

Professor Porter has served as a strategy advisor to top management in numerous leading U.S. and international companies, among them Caterpillar, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Royal Dutch Shell, Scotts Miracle-Gro, SYSCO, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Professor Porter currently serves on the board of directors of two public companies, Thermo Fisher Scientific Corporation and Parametric Technology Corporation.
Professor Porter serves as senior strategy advisor to the Boston Red Sox, a major league baseball team. He has advised numerous educational and community organizations on strategy.
Professor Porter is actively involved in assisting governments in the United States and abroad. He plays an active role in U.S. economic policy with the Executive Branch, Congress, and international organizations. Professor Porter is a founding member and member of the Executive Committee of the Council on Competitiveness, America’s leading private-sector competitiveness organization made up of chief executive officers of major corporations, unions, and universities. He also chairs the selection committee for the annual Corporate Stewardship Award of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
Professor Porter advises national leaders in numerous countries on competitiveness including Armenia, Colombia, Ireland, Nicaragua, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. He has personally led major studies of economic strategy for the governments of such countries as Canada, India, Kazakhstan, Libya, New Zealand, Portugal, and Thailand.
Professor Porter’s thinking about economic development for groups of neighboring countries has resulted in a long-term initiative within Central America, including the formation of the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS), a permanent institution based in Costa Rica.
At the state and local level, Professor Porter has worked extensively in his home state of Massachusetts and numerous others. He has been honored by governments for his work in Basque Country, Catalonia, Connecticut, and South Carolina. He chaired the Governor’s Council on Economic Growth and Technology in Massachusetts during the period when Massachusetts made dramatic improvements in competitiveness.

Honors and Awards

Professor Porter has been widely recognized for his work. Some of these honors (in chronological order) include Harvard's David A. Wells Prize in Economics (1973) for his research in industrial organization. He received the Graham and Dodd Award of the Financial Analysts Federation in 1980. His book Competitive Advantage won the George R. Terry Book Award of the Academy of Management in 1985 as the outstanding contribution to management thought.
Professor Porter was elected a Fellow of the International Academy of Management in 1985, a Fellow of the Academy of Management in 1988, and a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1991. In 1991, he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for outstanding contribution to the field of marketing and strategy, given by the American Marketing Association. Professor Porter was honored by the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1991 for his work on Massachusetts competitiveness.
In 1993, Professor Porter was named the Richard D. Irwin Outstanding Educator in Business Policy and Strategy by the Academy of Management.
He was the 1997 recipient of the Adam Smith Award of the National Association of Business Economists, given in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the business economics profession. In 1998, he received the International Academy of Management’s first-ever Distinguished Award for Contribution to the Field of Management.
In 2001, the annual Porter Prize, akin to the Deming Prize, was established in Japan in his name to recognize Japan’s leading companies in terms of strategy.
In 2003, the Academy of Management recognized Professor Porter with its highest award, for scholarly contributions to management.
In 2005, Professor Porter became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. That year, he was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Medal (presented by the American Agricultural Economics Association. That year, he was also honored by the South Carolina legislature for his efforts in assisting and promoting economic development in that state.
In 2007, Professor Porter’s book, Redefining Health Care, was awarded the James A. Hamilton Award as the outstanding health care book of the year.
Professor Porter has received six McKinsey Awards for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year, including an unprecedented four first-place awards.
Professor Porter has received honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics; Erasmus University (the Netherlands); HEC (France); Universidada Tecnica de Lisboa (Portugal); Adolfo Ibanez University (Chile); INCAE (Central America); The University of Deusto (Basque Country); The University of Iceland; Universidad de los Andes (Colombia); HHL-Leipzig Graduate School of Management (Germany); Universidad San Martin de Porres (Peru); Johnson and Wales University (United States); and Mt. Ida College (United States).
Professor Porter has been awarded national honors including the Creu de St. Jordi (Cross of St. George) from Catalonia (Spain) and the Jose Dolores Estrada Order of Merit, the highest civilian honor awarded by the Government of Nicaragua.

Personal History

Professor Porter was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and lived and traveled throughout the world as the son of a career Army officer. He was an all-state high school football and baseball player. At Princeton, he played intercollegiate golf and was New England champion. He was named to the 1968 NCAA Golf All-American Team. After graduating from college, Professor Porter served through the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He maintains a long-time interest in the esthetics and business of music and art, having worked on the problems of strategy with arts organizations and aspiring musicians. He serves as a trustee of Buckingham, Browne & Nichols, an independent school located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Professor Porter resides in Brookline, Massachusetts.