COHORT 2020 FACULTY PARTNERS
Ethan S. Bernstein
Edward W. Conrad Associate Professor of Business Administration
Ethan Bernstein (@ethanbernstein) is an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. In an era when the nature of work is changing, Professor Bernstein studies the impact of workplace transparency—the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviors, output, and/or performance—on productivity, with implications for leadership, collaboration, organization design, and new forms of organizing.
Professor Bernstein’s research has been published in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Harvard Business Review, Research on Organizational Change and Development, and People + Strategy, and it has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, Inc., Forbes, Fast Company, Businessweek, Esquire, Nikkei Business, Nikkei Shimbun, Le Monde, Maeil Business (Korea), and TEDx Boston, among others. He is a 2014 HBR McKinsey Award Finalist, and his research has won awards including the inaugural J. Richard Hackman Dissertation Award, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior award, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Best Publication in Organization and Management Theory award, the Academy of Management's 2014 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior award, the Academy of Management's 2014 Best Paper Based on a Dissertation Award, the INGRoup 2014 Best Paper award, the 2013 Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation Award from the International Leadership Association, the HBS Wyss Award, and the Susan G. Cohen Doctoral Research Award.
Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Bernstein spent a half-decade at The Boston Consulting Group in Toronto and Tokyo. Tapped by Elizabeth Warren to join the implementation team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he spent nearly two years in executive positions, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets, at the newest United States federal agency.
Professor Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA degree. While a doctoral student, he was a Kauffman Foundation Fellow in Law, Innovation, and Growth, and he remains a member of the New York and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He holds an AB in Economics from Amherst College, which included study at Doshisha University in Kyoto.
Professor Bernstein is a self-declared culinary adventurer and avid cyclist, runner, skier, reader, and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me listener. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives in Newton with his wife, Maly (HBS MBA 2006), and two young sons.
Jeffrey J. Bussgang
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
Jeffrey J. Bussgang is a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School as well as Co-Founder and General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm. He studies lean startups as well as strategy and management challenges for founders. He teaches Launching Technology Ventures in the MBA Elective Curriculum (a class focusing on product-market fit startups) and oversees the Rock Venture Partners program (a year-long seminar for aspiring venture capitalists). Jeff has co-authored over thirty HBS cases, book chapters and teaching notes regarding startup management and entrepreneurship. Jeff also runs The Graduate Syndicate, a micro-seed fund that Flybridge created to invest in startups co-founded by recent Harvard graduates.
Prior to co-founding Flybridge, Jeff co-founded and served as President, Chief Operating Officer, and Board Director at Upromise, a loyalty marketing and financial services firm that was acquired by Sallie Mae. He also served as an executive Open Market, an Internet commerce software leader that went public in 1996. Prior to Open Market, Jeff was with the strategy consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group.
Jeff has authored two books: Entering StartUpLand: An Essential Guide to Finding the Right Job (2017) and Mastering the VC Game (2010), to provide entrepreneurs an insider’s guide to financing and company-building. This book has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch and The Financial Times as an essential guide for entrepreneurs.
Jeff is an active community member, serving as co-chairman of the leadership council at educational non-profit, Facing History and Ourselves, co-founder of a private-public partnership designed to tackle the underrepresentation of highly-skilled minority employees in Boston’s innovation ecosystem, Hack. Diversity, co-founder and co-chair of an immigration reform non-profit, the Global EIR Coalition, and co-founder and former chair of the progressive policy organization, The Alliance for Business Leadership. Jeff also serves on the boards of the New England Venture Capital Association and EdX, the massively open online course provider created through a joint venture between Harvard and MIT.
Jeff holds a BA in Computer Science from Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar and a Ford Scholar.
Frances X. Frei
UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management
Frances Frei is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the conditions for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations and culture. She regularly advises senior executives embarking on large-scale change initiatives and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for significantly improving performance.
A global thought leader on leadership and strategy, Frances is widely recognized for her dynamic teaching style and breakthrough courses optimized for rapid, lasting impact. She developed one of the most popular classes at HBS, which explores business models that reliably delight customers. She also led the design and launch of HBS’s innovative FIELD curriculum built around learning experiences that are experiential and immersive.
While at HBS, Frances has held extensive leadership roles including Senior Associate Dean for faculty development and recruiting, for executive education, and faculty chair for the MBA required curriculum. Within each of these roles, Frances led significant change efforts. Highlights including addressing the gender gap in satisfaction and performance for students and faculty and broadening the reach of executive education to incorporate the evolving needs of executives and their organizations. This includes enhancing our off-campus program as well as using our state-of-the art HBX studio on campus.
In 2017, Frances was tapped to be Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy with a mandate to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. In her ongoing work with Uber, she has focused on giving thousands of employees the tools to excel in a context of hyper-growth, strategic change, and an evolution in cultural values.
Her firsthand experience in Silicon Valley gave her a new lens on the urgent topic of trust, and in May 2018, Frances delivered a widely-viewed TED talk on ‘How to build (and rebuild) trust.’ This powerful framework delivers a crash course on stakeholder trust: how to build it, maintain it and restore it when lost.
Frances is the best-selling author of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business. She and her co-author Anne Morriss published their second book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, in June 2020.
She holds a Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hise Gibson
Colonel, United States Army
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School
Professor Gibson graduated from West Point Academy, where he was a member of the Division-1A Army football team. Following graduation, he was commissioned in the US Army as an Aviation Officer in the UH60 Blackhawk Helicopter. He served with distinction in various command and staff positions for over 25 years with his most recent operational assignment being as a Battalion Commander in the historic 82nd Airborne Division, earning the rank of Colonel before retiring in 2021. He has led soldiers in combat. Among his military decorations are the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Master Aviator badge, Parachutist badge, and the Air Assault badge.
Professor Gibson has an MS in Operations Research from the Naval Postgraduate School and a Masters in Operational Art and Science from the Air Command and Staff College. Dr. Gibson earned his Doctorate of Business Administration from Harvard University in Technology and Operations Management. Until July of 2021, Colonel Gibson served as an Academy Professor in the Systems Engineering Department at the United States Military Academy. He also established and directed the Systems Decisions and Analysis Center as well as directed the department’s core engineering sequence and engaged in strategic outreach as a Fellow at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Professor Gibson's research and consulting activities have been in the areas of technology integrations, operational effectiveness, leadership, leader development, human capital development, change management, and leading teams through crisis. He currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his wife Nicole and two daughters.
Lane A. Glenn, PhD
President - Northern Essex Community College
Dr. Lane A. Glenn is President of Northern Essex Community College (NECC), with campuses in Haverhill and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Dr. Glenn is focused on student success and is passionate about finding ways to help students achieve their educational goals, especially students who are underprepared for college. In addition, he is a strong advocate for colleges and universities as engines of economic and workforce development—particularly in Massachusetts Gateway Cities.
As a researcher, author and consultant, Dr. Glenn has also helped advance community colleges through his involvement on numerous regional and national boards. He is the chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education’s Task Force on Statewide Assessment; was appointed to the STEM Advisory Council by the Massachusetts governor; and chairs the International Advisory Board of the Chair Academy, an organization that provides leadership development programs for college and university leaders around the world.
Dr. Glenn has been described as “optimistic thought leader” who actively promotes the community college mission in a number of publications, on social media, and through his blog, “Running the Campus.” In 2018, he was named the “Pacesetter of the Year” by the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations for his Higher Education advocacy efforts.
He holds a PhD in Theater from Michigan State University, a master’s degree in Speech from Oklahoma State University, and a bachelor’s in English from Northeastern State University. He is proud to say he started his education at Rose State College, a community college in Midwest City, Oklahoma.
Ranjay Gulati
Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class Of 1942 Professor Of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Ranjay Gulati is an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms. His recent work explores leadership and strategic challenges for building high growth organizations in turbulent markets. Some of his prior work has focused on the enablers and implications of within-firm and inter-firm collaboration. He has looked at both when and how firms should leverage greater connectivity within and across their boundaries to enhance performance.
His most recent book, Principles of Management (Cengage, 2013), is a primer on the fundamentals of management that provides a new overview of the field using contemporary examples and cases. In his book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization (Harvard Business Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the George Terry Best Book in Management Award, Professor Gulati explores how "resilient" companies—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and increase profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. Based on more than a decade of research in a range of industries including manufacturing, retail, professional services, media, information technology, and healthcare, the book uncovers the path to resilience by showing companies how to break down internal barriers that impede action, build bridges across divisions, and create a network of collaborators. His previous book, Managing Network Resources: Alliances, Affiliations, and other Relational Assets (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines the implications of firms’ growing portfolio of inter-firm connections. He demonstrates how firms increasingly are scaling back what they consider to be their core activities, and at the same time expanding their array of offerings to customers by entering into a web of collaborations. He has also co-edited a book on leading sustainable change and co-edited two books that focus on the dynamics of competition in emerging technology-intensive industries.
Professor Gulati is the past-President of the Business Policy and Strategy Division at the Academy of Management and an elected fellow of the Strategic Management Society. He was ranked as one of the top ten most cited scholars in Economics and Business over a decade by ISI-Incite. The Economist, Financial Times, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have listed him as among the top handful of business school scholars whose work is most relevant to management practice. He has been a Harvard MacArthur Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow. His research has been published in leading journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, American Journal of Sociology, Strategic Management Journal, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, strategy+business, and the Financial Times. Professor Gulati sits on the editorial board of several leading journals.
He has been a frequent guest on CNBC as well as a panelist on several of their series on topics that include: the Business of Innovation, Collaboration, and Leadership Vision. Professor Gulati holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a Master's Degree in Management from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, and two Bachelor's Degrees, in Computer Science and Economics, from Washington State University and St. Stephens College, New Delhi, respectively. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Sandy Schultz Hessler
Professor Start Up Intensive at Central Wyoming College and Founder of Six Minutes Daily
Sandy has spent her career helping individuals and organizations develop their vision and make it a reality. She has over 30 years of experience working with business ranging in size from Fortune 50 companies to start-ups, along with a lifetime of study on human potential and consciousness. Sandy began her career in brand management at Procter & Gamble, then cofounded a marketing services start up called Imagitas that sold to Pitney Bowes in 2005. She has taught leadership, communications and marketing at Tufts University, Miami University of Ohio and Harvard Kennedy School where she served as Assistant Dean, running the Office of Career Advancement (career services).
For the last seven years Sandy has created and taught leadership classes and the Start Up Intensive, a 10-week, 200-hour boot camp in Jackson, WY. She takes great pride in witnessing the success of numerous clients and organizations around igniting their inner wisdom to manifest their powerful future through her company, Six Minutes Daily, Inc. Six Minutes Daily is currently creating accountability tools including a habit building app to help people and teams build their daily practice toward alignment, health, connections and prosperity. Her book entitled, “Six Minutes Daily,” comes out in Winter 2022.
Sandy has her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University, and advanced degrees from Harvard University, Miami University of Ohio and the University of Santa Monica. She is a mother of five and an avid hiker, snowboarder and adventurer.
Joshua D. Margolis
JAMES DINAN AND ELIZABETH MILLER PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
UNIT HEAD, ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
CHAIR, PROGRAM FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Joshua Margolis is James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration and the Unit Head for the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. He is also Faculty Chair of the Program for Leadership Development and Faculty Chair of the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning.
Joshua’s research focuses on leading in complex situations involving tradeoffs. In particular, he focuses on the distinctive ethical challenges that arise in organizations and how managers can navigate these challenges with practical effectiveness and moral integrity, especially in perform-or-else settings. He is currently engaged in research on how companies and individuals defy countervailing forces to make a significant impact and how professionals in a variety of settings navigate moral adversity and address ethical challenges with a combination of ingenuity and integrity.
Joshua has published his work in Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Business Ethics Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes; and along with James P. Walsh, he authored the book, People and Profits: the Search for a Link between a Company’s Social and Financial Performance.
Joshua has received the Robert F. Greenhill Award, the Student Association Faculty Award for teaching excellence, the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching, and the Academy of Management award for Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior.
Joshua received his B.A. from Yale University and his A.M. (Sociology) and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University, where he was also a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and the Professions. Prior to joining the HBS faculty in 2000, he was on the faculty at the University of Michigan as a Fellow in the Society of Scholars.
Jan W. Rivkin
C. ROLAND CHRISTENSEN PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN, CHAIR, MBA PROGRAM
Jan W. Rivkin is the Senior Associate Dean and Chair of the MBA Program and a Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. In the past, he has served as Senior Associate Dean for Research and head of the Strategy Unit. His research, course development, and teaching focus on two topics: business strategy and U.S. competitiveness.
Rivkin’s business strategy work examines the interactions across functional and product boundaries within a firm – that is, the connections that link marketing, production, logistics, finance, human resource management, and other parts of a firm. His work analyzes, first, how such interactions constrain managerial behavior and, second, how managers use cognitive devices and organizational design to cope with decisions whose ramifications span boundaries.
Rivkin's scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Management Science, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Research Policy. Much of this work uses simulations of complex adaptive systems to examine the theoretical implications of cross-cutting interactions. His empirical work on the topic employs a mix of large-scale statistical studies, field research, and case studies.
In support of his strategy teaching and research, Rivkin has completed case studies on Airborne Express, BMG Entertainment, Dell, Delta Air Lines, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Husky Injection Molding Systems, LEGO, Lycos, Microsoft, Ryanair, Whirlpool Corporation, and Yahoo, among others.
Rivkin also co-chairs HBS's project on the competitiveness of the United States. His work in this domain focuses on (a) how managers choose to locate business activities in the United States or elsewhere and (b) how business leaders can best work with policymakers, nonprofit leaders, educators, and others to bring shared prosperity to America’s cities.
Rivkin received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard. Earlier, he studied chemical engineering and public policy at Princeton and obtained a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics on a Marshall Scholarship. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, Rivkin led case teams and managed client relationships at Monitor Company, a strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Richard S. Ruback
BAKER FOUNDATION PROFESSOR
WILLARD PRESCOTT SMITH PROFESSOR OF CORPORATE FINANCE, EMERITUS
Richard S. Ruback is the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance at the Harvard Business School. He is currently focusing his research in applied corporate finance, especially on corporate-control transactions and valuation. His course development work parallels his research interests. He has taught a variety of corporate finance courses throughout his career. Over the last few years, he and Royce Yudkoff have been developing and teaching a new second year case course titled “The Financial Management of Smaller Firms” and a field course called “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition”. Recently, Ruback and Yudkoff published their book, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business. Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is a practical roadmap through the steps required to find, evaluate, negotiate and finance the acquisition of a smaller firm.
Ruback earned his Ph.D. in business administration at the University of Rochester in 1980 and taught at MIT's Sloan School before joining the HBS faculty as a visiting professor in 1987. He was appointed associate professor in 1988 and full professor in 1989. Ruback has served as an editor for the Journal of Financial Economics and is the author of numerous articles on corporate finance and valuation.
Ruback has served as a consultant to corporations on corporate finance issues and has acted as an independent advisor to outside directors. He also served as an expert witness on valuation and security issues.
Lori Trahan
U.S. Congresswoman, Massachusetts 3rd District
Lori Trahan was born and raised in a working-class family in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her father was a union ironworker and her mother was a domestic worker who juggled various part time jobs while raising four girls. The first in her family to graduate from college, Lori earned a scholarship to play Division 1 volleyball at Georgetown University. She joined the staff of former Congressman Marty Meehan as a scheduler, eventually working her way up to Chief of Staff. Following her public service, Lori began working in the private sector as the only female executive at a tech company before moving on to co-found a woman owned and operated consulting firm, Concire, where she advised various companies on business strategy, how to create the conditions for employees – especially women - to thrive. She and her husband, Dave, currently reside in Westford, MA and are raising two young girls, Grace and Caroline, while keeping tabs on their three grown stepsons, Thomas, Dean, and Christian.
As a member of the House Education and Labor and House Armed Services Committees, Lori is focused on fighting for working families on issues such as affordable health care, quality public education, workforce development, the environment, and working to end the pain and suffering of the opioid crisis. Lori is the first PortugueseAmerican woman elected to Congress and is a member of the New Dems and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Brian L. Trelstad
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Brian Trelstad is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School in the General Management Unit, teaching an elective course on Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, a Short Immersive Program on Effective Strategic Philanthropy and the first-year required course on Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA). His teaching and research focuses on innovators (and the funders who support them) who are looking to develop systemic solutions to our most pressing social and environmental problems.
Brian is also a Partner and Board Member at Bridges Fund Management, a leading global impact investing fund with offices in London and New York. Bridges US Sustainable Growth Fund is a market-rate impact investing firm that invests in health, education and environmental services business. Prior to Bridges, Brian was the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen, where he oversaw investments into companies that were delivering health, water, energy, and agriculture services to economic base of the pyramid in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As CIO, he was a member of Acumen’s management team and helped build out the network of country operations that worked closely with the entrepreneurs.
Brian is a co-chair of Impact Capital Managers, a national membership association of impact investors in the United States, was a founding board member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and the principal architect of the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) of the Global Impact Investing Network (the GIIN). Prior to Acumen Fund, Brian worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, was a lead environmental staff person at the Corporation for National Service, and has been involved in a range of non-profit and for-profit start ups. Brian serves on the board of VisionSpring, Candid, and New Jersey Future and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Brian has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and an MA in City & Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2012 to 2019, he taught a graduate course in social entrepreneurship at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.
Mitch Weiss
Professor of Management Practice, Richard L. Menschel Faculty Fellow
Mitch Weiss is a Professor of Management Practice in the Entrepreneurial Management unit and the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Fellow at the Harvard Business School. He created and teaches the school's course on Public Entrepreneurship—on public leaders and private entrepreneurs who invent a difference in the world. He also teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager in the first year of the MBA Program. He was a 2015 recipient of the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching and a Greenhill Award recipient for 2015-2016. He helped build the Young American Leaders Program at Harvard Business School and is a senior advisor to the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. Mitch's work and the Public Entrepreneurship course has been referenced in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Politico, and other outlets. He is the author of the forthcoming We the Possibility from Harvard Business Review Press (2020).
Prior to joining HBS in 2014, Mitch was Chief of Staff and a partner to Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino. Mitch helped shape New Urban Mechanics, Boston’s municipal innovation strategy, and make it a model for peer-produced government and change. He also championed Boston’s Innovation District as a regional platform for entrepreneurship and growth.
Mitch contributed to Boston’s educational reform agenda, including its District-Charter compact. He led speechwriting for the Mayor’s Inaugural and State of the City addresses. In April 2013, he guided the Mayor’s Office response to the Marathon Bombings and played a key role in starting One Fund Boston.
Mitch has presented on government innovation at 10 Downing Street and the World Bank. He was recognized by the Boston Business Journal as one of Boston’s “Top 40 under 40” and by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce as one of Boston’s “Ten Outstanding Young Leaders.”
From 2006 to 2009, Mitch was the first Executive Director of the Tobin Project, a catalyst for transformative research in the social sciences. Prior to his roles in the public and social sectors, Mitch worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. where he focused primarily on mergers and acquisitions for many well-recognized food companies.
Mitch holds an A.B. with Honors in Economics from Harvard University and a Master in Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he was a George Baker Scholar.