New Idea Wizard

Voted the third leading business-strategy analyst (just behind Peter Drucker and Tom Friedman) in Optimize Magazine, Thomas Davenport is a world-renowned thought-leader who has helped hundreds of companies revitalize their management practices. He combines his interests in business, research, and academia as the President’s Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College.  Tom earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in social science and has taught at the Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has also directed research centers at Accenture, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, and CSC. Sample audience reviews include:

“The smartest business speaker out there!”   “Had the audience on the edge of their seats!”    “Energized.”    “A rock star!”

“I learned more from this speaker in one hour than from any I’ve ever heard.”    “Appropriately provocative.”

An agile and prolific thinker, Tom has written or  co-authored twelve best-selling business books and has been a creator and early author for several key business ideas including: knowledge management (four books, one the best-selling Working Knowledge); human approaches to information management (two books); business process reengineering (on which he wrote or co-authored the first article, the first book, and the first casebook); and realizing the value of enterprise systems. Tom's book, The Attention Economy, was named one of the ten best books of 2001 by Amazon.com and by Borders.com and was the winner of the Library Journal award for one of the best business books of 2002. What’s the Big Idea: Creating and Capitalizing on the Best Management Thinking, was published in May 2003 and has become a top 10 best-seller in several countries. Published by Harvard Business School Press in September 2005, Dr. Davenport’s Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers, is an Amazon bestseller.  What’s next? Tom has conducted a major research study on “Competing on Analytics: How Fact-Based Decisions and Business Intelligence Drive Performance.” The related article, which was published in the January 2006 Harvard Business Review decision-making issue, was the organization’s bestselling 2006 reprint. Tom’s first book on the topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, published March, 2007, is a business bestseller and is already in its fifth printing. A related Harvard Business Review case study appeared in the May 2007 HBR with another eagerly anticipated book on the topic, Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results to follow in January 2010. Davenport’s latest article on decision making will  appear in the October 2009 Harvard Business Review.

Tom was one of the first management thinkers recruited to blog for Harvard Business Online and his “The Next Big Thing” blog is a reader favorite. Tom has written over 100 articles for such publications as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, and the Financial Times, and is quoted frequently in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Week, Fortune, Business 2.0, the Boston Globe, and Fast Company. He is also interviewed frequently by the broadcast media.

In the Spring of 2008, Tom received two impressive honors. CIO Insight named his Competing on Analytics book one of the all-time “Top 15 Most Groundbreaking Management Books” and Ziff Davis once again included him as one of only four IT management thought leaders on their “100 Most Influential People in IT” list. Tom has been named one of 10 “Masters of the New Economy” by CIO Magazine, one of 25 “E-Business Gurus” by Darwin, one of the most trusted consultants by Optimize Magazine, and one of the top 25 consultants in the world by Consulting Magazine.

With his vast storehouse of industry stories, research & data, and cutting edge ideas, Tom Davenport balances research-based business acumen with practical application. His areas of expertise include improving the productivity of knowledge workers, information and knowledge management, attention management, idea generation, innovation, competing on analytics, managing enterprise applications for business value, and business process reengineering. More information on Tom Davenport is available at his website, www.tomdavenport.com.