Leadership Sage

Bob is the executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business and an associate partner specializing in transformational, organizational, and technological change. He is also John R. Galvin Professor of Leadership at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University. He has taught previously at the University of Michigan, MIT School of Engineering and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was a founding faculty member of Leaders for Manufacturing, an industry/university partnership. He has consulted extensively in the fields of leadership development, organization design, and the implementation of new technology in a wide variety of global companies.

His newest book, Driving Results Through Social Networks (Jossey-Bass, 2008) which he co-authored with Rob Cross is the first management book that applies network theory to leadership and organizational performance. Prior, his book Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Be a Great Leader, was hailed by Harvard’s Rosabeth Kanter as “a guide for aspiring leaders in all walks of life” and by Wharton’s Mike Useem as “an organizational playbook for transforming managers into leaders.”

In 2002, he co-authored with Warren Bennis a book entitled Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders (Harvard Business Press, 2002) that explores the motivations and aspirations of leaders under the age of 35 and over the age of 70. A BusinessWeek best seller and translated into 11 languages, the book was recently reissued with a new introduction as Leading for Lifetime. Bob has also published articles on leadership and change in the Harvard Business Review, Harvard Management Update, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.com.

His first major book, What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise, won the 1994 C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Thomas has been a featured speaker at dozens of corporate and NGO events, including those sponsored by BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan School, Conference Board, Society for Human Resource Management, PBS, McGraw-Hill corporate learning, the Young Presidents Organization, the Treasury Executive Institute and NASA.

Bob speaks persuasively and extensively to a wide range of audiences on the topics of leadership, transformational change, and organizational design. He has been a featured speaker at numerous professional conferences and workshops, including the Harvard Business Review conference on “Leading Innovation,” Conference Board Workshop on “Innovation and Change”, MIT Conference on the “21st Century Organization”. He keynoted the American Society for Training and Development’s conference on “New Organizational Forms”.