Sandra Sucher

Sandra J. Sucher is Professor of Management Practice, Joseph L. Rice, III Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School and is a member of the General Management unit. She joined the faculty of Harvard Business School after 25 years in industry and nonprofit management, including ten years in fashion retailing and twelve years at Fidelity Investments where she served as chief quality officer. At HBS, Sucher has taught  the required MBA course, “Leadership and Corporate Accountability," for ten years and led it for five. For fifteen years she has taught "The Moral Leader" – an elective in the MBA curriculum that examines leadership and moral decision making through literature and historical accounts. Sucher is the author of dozens of cases on leadership and the ethical dilemmas of businesses and their managers, and two books: The Moral Leader: Challenges, Insights and Tools, (Routledge 2008) and Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-based Leadership Course, A Guide For Instructors (Routledge 2007). Her research on layoffs, restructuring and global workforce change has been documented in more than fifteen cases, notes, research reports, and videos.  She is currently writing a book on how companies earn trust in the global economy based on eight years of research on global companies'' best practices in exercising power in ways that earn trust.

From 1986 until 1998, Sucher worked at Fidelity Investments. As Vice President of Corporate Quality, she focused the firm''s division-level quality groups on customer loyalty research. As Vice President of Retail Service Quality, she set service strategy for the retail business and improved service and operations processes, including the processes of opening new accounts, solving customer problems, and transferring assets among financial firms.  Prior to Fidelity, Sucher spent 10 years in fashion retailing at Filene''s, a Boston-based department store chain. She wrote the proposal, approved by Federated Department Stores, to expand Filene''s Basement from a single store to a national chain. In her last assignment, as Vice President of Customer Service, she improved customer service for Filene''s then 14-unit regional business. Sucher has served on two corporate boards and as Chair of the Better Business Bureau of Boston. Sucher received her MBA from Harvard Business School with first- and second-year honors; she also earned a Masters of Arts in Teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA from the University of Michigan, High Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa.