I have been an academic most of my working life (after working in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways). Currently I am Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where I have been since graduating with a doctorate from MIT in 1968, with stints at other universities in the U.S., France, and England. (My undergraduate degree is from McGill, in Mechanical Engineering.) For the past 20 years, I have been half time at McGill, and have spent a third to almost half of those years in Europe.
I devote myself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. In 2004, I published Managers not MBAs, and in 2007, Tracking Strategies. A new book, Managing, will appear in 2009. I have also been working for many years on an electronic pamphlet, entitled "Getting Past Smith and Marx: Toward a Balanced Society".
I have worked for much of the past decade, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan, to develop new approaches to management education and development. The International Masters in Practicing Management has been running for thirteen years; the Advanced Leadership Program has been going for four years; and we launched the International Masters for Health Leadership in 2006. All are rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. In 2007 we created CoachingOurselves.com, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition: practicing managers developing themselves. I teach in some of these programs and supervise doctoral students, and occasionally do public speeches, mostly to convey a particular message or visit a place I wish to see.
In recent years, I have shifted toward more general writing. I have done some newspaper articles (listed at the end of Articles), and I like to write short stories, some of which are on this site: I hope to publish a collection of them eventually. A couple of years ago, I published Why I Hate Flying (now in paperback as The Flying Circus), a spoof on the foibles of flying.
In all, I have published about 150 articles (listed on this website with annotations and, where available, web linkages, under Articles) and 15 books (also so listed). Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l'Ordre national du Quebec, selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management, and two McKinsey prizes for articles in the Harvard Business Review. Honorary degrees and other awards are listed in my full C.V., which I call my Scorecard. You can also see a piece I wrote on my career up to the early 1990s (1993 autobiography), and, if you wish, look at my collection of "beaver sculptures".
I spend my public life dealing with organizations and I spend my private life escaping from them. This I do on a bicycle (preferably on quiet roads in Europe), up mountains, and in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada atop cross-country skis and in a canoe. I like to do this with my wife Sasha, and my daughters Susie and Lisa, and perhaps soon with my grandchildren, Laura and Tomas.
View
my full C.V.
(pdf: 27 pages)
View
an autobiography (1993)
Courtesy of Elsevier
Science. Single copies can be downloaded and printed for personal research.
(pdf: 40 pages)
Beyond
Selfishness
Audio
only Video
See
a profile in Fast Company (November 2000)
The kids' idea, not mine! Brrrr...
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