Leadership and IT Strategist

In 2008 McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He was also recently recognized by Baseline magazine as one of 50 most influential people in business IT.

McAfee’s eagerly anticipated book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, will be published in November 2009 by Harvard Business School Press. McAfee coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. His blog, andrewmcafee.org/blog, is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati).

In the July / August 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published “Investing in the IT that Makes a Competitive Difference,” a summary of their research investigating IT’s links to changes in competition. This work was the first to reveal that competition began to heat up in the US in the mid 1990s –  to become faster paced, more turbulent, and more winner-take-all –  and that this acceleration was greater in industries that spent more on IT.  This research continues, and continues to highlight that technology appears to be significantly reshaping the landscape of competition.

McAfee is the author or co-author of more than fifteen scholarly articles and ninety case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. This work has convinced him that modern information technology is the most powerful tool available to business leaders, yet also the most misunderstood and under-appreciated resource at their disposal. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry.

An engaging and provocative speaker, he presents frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world.

Andrew McAfee joined the faculty of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School in 1998. He is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.