Speaker: Amy C. Edmondson

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management. The Novartis Chair was established to enable the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful business enterprises for the betterment of society. Edmondson’s research examines leadership, learning and innovation in teams and organizations, and has been published in numerous academic and managerial articles. Her book Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012) emphasizes managing the activities that enable collaborative work across boundaries, rather than designing and managing stable teams. She is currently studying collaborative innovation in the context of the built environment, with a particular focus on projects related to smart cities and eco-cities.

Professor Edmondson teaches MBA and Executive Education courses in leadership, team effectiveness, and organizational learning, and a doctoral course in field research methods. She has served on 29 doctoral committees and is the author of more than 25 Harvard Business School case studies, including cases on Arup, The Cleveland Clinic, General Motors Powertrain, Prudential Financial, Simmons Mattress Company, YUM brands, IDEO product design, and NASA’s failed Columbia mission. In 2003, the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division selected Professor Edmondson for the Cummings Award for outstanding achievement in early mid-career, and in both 2000 and 2012 she received the OB division’s annual awards for the best paper published in the prior year. Her article with Anita Tucker, “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change” received the 2004 Accenture Award for significant contribution to management practice.

Speaker: Lenny Solomon

In 1985 Lenny Solomon formed Harvard University’s ABCD Committee, a computer-oriented group that includes system administrators and programmers, application developers, computer power uses, faculty, and staff. He served as its head until 2010. Beginning with just seven people, the committee quickly grew and currently boasts a membership of over 1800 individuals from most of the nooks and crannies in the greater Harvard community including the teaching hospitals.

 Mr. Solomon worked as a research engineer and manager at Harvard for 38 years. Although he officially retired in December 2009, he continues to work at the university as a part-time consultant. In his spare time he’s written several award-winning songs and regularly performs in the New England area with his folk/country/blues band (www.solomonband.com). Mr. Solomon has engineering degrees from the City College of New York and MIT.

 
Speaker: Bill Snyder

William M. Snyder is a founding partner of Social Capital Group. 
Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier. A new organizational form is emerging in the information economy, alongside work groups, project teams and informal networks. It’s called a community of practice — a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise — and it promises to radically galvanize knowledge sharing, learning, and change. Etienne C. Wenger and William M. Snyder explain in this excerpt from their article in the Harvard Business Review. [ Fromhttp://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1317.html ]

Speaker: James Jer-Don

Dr. Jer-Don is a Boston-area pedagogy guru.
Dr. Jim Jer-Don is World Languages Teacher at The Winsor School in Boston, and a long-term faculty member at the Harvard University Project Zero Classroom Institute. Dr. Jer-Don is a master teacher, expert on student learning and learning theory, and has inspired a generation of teachers and students with his innovative approaches to learning, which focus on uncovering the intrinsic motivation in the student, and putting the student in charge of her own learning. Dr. Jer-Don will share his classroom experiences and explore with Learning Organization Academy participants ways to uncover motivation and promote learning in the workplace.

 
Last year’s speakers included:
•Marcia Conner, a blogger for FastCompany, consultant to some of the largest companies in the world, and author of three books including The New Social Learning.

•Chris Jernstedt, a cognitive scientist from Dartmouth College. He has been featured on the Discovery Channel Canada and in Wired Magazine and The New York Times.

•Jim Martin, the Dean of U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He shares practical advice for decision-making in times of stress and rapid change.

•Bill Snyder, a leading consultant and writer in the field of organizational theory who believes the future of organizations involves creating informal networks.

•Daniel Wilson, a Principal Investigator at Project Zero where he explores inherent dilemmas of knowing, trusting, leading, and belonging in adult collaborative learning