Michael Tushman

Michael Tushman holds degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.E.E.), Cornell University (M. S.), and the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. (Ph.D.). Tushman was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998; he was the Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business from 1989 to 1998. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT (1982, 1996) and INSEAD (1995-1998, 2011). In 2008 Tushman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva. In 2013 Tushman was awarded the Academy of Management’s Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management. He also won the 2013 Academy of Management Review Decade Award for his paper with Mary J. Benner, “Exploitation, Exploration and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited". Tushman was also the recipient of the 2013 Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching, and was the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).

Professor Tushman is internationally recognized for his work on the relations between technological change, executive leadership and organization adaptation. His work centers on the role of senior teams in building organizations that can host both incremental as well as more discontinuous innovation as well as leading those organizational changes associated with these innovation streams. His work on ambidextrous organizational designs focuses on those organizational and senior team characteristics that enable firms to both exploit current capabilities as well explore into new spaces. He is working on the impact of distributed innovation on incumbent firms as well as the role of organizational identity on a firm’s ability to handle paradoxical strategic requirements. He has published numerous articles and books including Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Renewal and Change (with C. O'Reilly), Harvard Business School Press, 1997, 2002; Navigating Change: How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation (with D. Hambrick and D. Nadler,1998), Harvard Business School Press; Competing by Design: A Blueprint for Organizational Architectures (with D. Nadler), Oxford University Press, 1998; and Managing Strategic Innovation: A Collection of Readings (with P. Anderson), Oxford University Press, 1997, 2004.

Tushman teaches courses on leading innovation and organization effectiveness and on leading strategic innovation and change. At Columbia, he won the first W. H. Newman Award for excellence and innovation in the classroom. At Harvard, Tushman is involved in comprehensive and focused executive education programs, the MBA program, as well as the doctoral program. Tushman was the faculty chair of the Advanced Management Program as well as co-chair of the Management track of the DBA program. He is now faculty chair of the Program for Leadership Development and co-faculty chair of Leading Change and Organizational Renewal. He has supervised many doctoral students, several who have won national awards for their dissertation research.

Tushman is an active consultant and instructor in corporate executive education programs around the world. Tushman was senior advisor to the Delta Consulting Group and past trustee of IBM Credit Corporation. Tushman is a founding director of Change Logic.

Professor Tushman has also served on the boards of many scholarly journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organizational Dynamics, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He has also served as chairperson of the Organization and Management Theory and the Technology and Innovation Management Divisions of the Academy of Management. Tushman was elected Fellow of the Academy of Management in 1996, and received the distinguished scholar awards in the Technology and Innovation Management (1999) and Organization Management and Theory (2003) Divisions of the Academy of Management as well as at INFORMS Technology Management Section (2010). His paper with Mary Benner won the Academy of Management Review’s best paper award in 2004. In 2010, his paper with Charles O'Reilly and Bruce Harreld won the Accenture Award from the California Management Review. In 2005, Tushman was named Lecturer of the Year at CHAMPS, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). In 2011 he received The Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigour & Relevance in the Study of Management from London Business School. In 2014, Tushman was recognized as a Foundational Scholar in the Knowledge and Innovation Group of the Strategic Management Society.

Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration Chair, Program for Leadership Development

Michael Tushman holds degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.E.E.), Cornell University (M. S.), and the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. (Ph.D.). Tushman was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998; he was the Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business from 1989 to 1998. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT (1982, 1996) and INSEAD (1995-1998, 2011). In 2008 Tushman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva. In 2013 Tushman was awarded the Academy of Management’s Career Achievement Award for Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management. He also won the 2013 Academy of Management Review Decade Award for his paper with Mary J. Benner, “Exploitation, Exploration and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited". Tushman was also the recipient of the 2013 Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching, and was the winner of the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).