Great thinkers: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Training Journal, Sept, 2007 by Debbie Carter

BACKGROUND: Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at the Harvard Business School, specialising in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.

In 1964 she graduated with honours from Bryn Mawr, the women's liberal arts college near Philadelphia, after which she studied sociology at the University of Michigan until 1967. She completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard University between 1975 and 1976. She was a professor at Yale University and a Fellow in Law and Social Science at Harvard Law School before joining the Harvard Business School faculty in 1986.

From 1989 to 1992 she edited the Harvard Business Review. In 1997 and 1998 she founded the Business Leadership in the Social Sector (BLSS) project, involving more than 100 US leaders in dialogue about business/government partnerships to improve American communities.

She is a co-founder of Goodmeasure Inc., a consulting firm that has developed leadership and consulting tools based on her work. Kanter has been named as one of the "50 most powerful women in the world" (The Times) and one of the "50 most influential business thinkers in the world" (Accenture and Thinkers 50 research).

IDEAS: Kanter's background as a sociologist shines through her work; she is concerned about organisations as communities and cultures. Her early work looked at the communes of the 1960s and the social movement that brought them into existence.

Her research into tokenism in the 1970s chronicled the experiences of a small number of women sales managers at a large industrial supply company. She noted that token women managers shared several common experiences, including increased visibility, performance pressures, social isolation, and assimilation into social stereotypes. The research formed the basis of Men & Women of the Corporation (1977), which won the C Wright Mills award for the best social issue book of the year, and the video that was produced as result of that work, A Tale of 'O': On Being Different (1980), is among the world's most widely used diversity tools. A related book, Work & Family in the United States (1997), set a policy agenda and, in 2001, a coalition of university centres created the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for the best research on work and family issues.

Kanter's current research focuses on the development of new leadership for the digital age. In her book When Giants Learn to Dance (1989), she demonstrated how companies worldwide could master the new terms of competition at the dawn of the global information age. In World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy (1997), she identified the rise of new business networks and analysed the benefits and tensions of globalisation. In e-Volve (2001), she explained how the Internet could produce a great leap forward to a shared consciousness around the world and connect people everywhere. The best businesses in the digital world, she says, will be those that foster community internally and serve communities externally.

Her most recent book Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End (2004) describes the culture and dynamics of high-performance organisations as compared with those in decline, and shows how to lead turnarounds across a broad spectrum of organisations.

INFLUENCE: Kanter believes it's the job of people at the top to set the goals and values of the corporation; the middle layers design and manage the programmes and the systems, the forums and relationships that bind the whole together, while the project ideas and innovations bubble up from the bottom layers.

If business managers are to succeed in the new world of digital commerce, Kanter believes they must have curiosity and imagination; good communication skills; a cosmopolitan mindset, and an ability to embrace complexity and find connections while still caring about feeding people's bodies and spirits.

Her research now concentrates on developing leaders, to ensure that successful leaders can apply their skills not only to managing their own enterprises but also to helping solve the most challenging national and global problems.

Debbie Carter is editor of TJ. If you would like to nominate a 'Great Thinker', please send your nomination to her at debbiecarter@trainingjournal.com