Résumé

I have been an academic most of my professional life (after working in Operational Research at the Canadian National Railways). Currently I am Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, where I have been since graduating with a doctorate from MIT in 1968, with stints at other universities in Canada the U.S., France, and England. (My undergraduate degree is from McGill, in Mechanical Engineering.) For the past 25 years, I have been half time at McGill, spending several months each year in Europe.

I devote myself largely to writing and research, over the years especially about managerial work, strategy formation, and forms of organizing. In 2004 I published Managers not MBAs, in 2007 Tracking Strategies and in 2009 Managing. I will soon complete a monograph entitled Managing the Myths of Health Care. Then I will turn to an electronic pamphlet I have been working on for over a decade entitled Getting Past Smith and Marx: Toward a Balanced Society.

I have worked for much of the past decade, in collaboration with colleagues from Canada, England, France, India, and Japan, to develop new approaches to management education and development. The International Masters in Practicing Management has been running since 1996; the Advanced Leadership Program and the International Masters for Health Leadership have been running since 2006. All are rather novel ways to help managers learn from their own experience. I teach in these programs and otherwise supervise doctoral students, restricting my public speeches, mostly to convey a particular message or visit a place I wish to see. In 2007, Phil LeNir, Sasha Sadilova, Jonathan Gosling and I created CoachingOurselves.com, which brings all these efforts to natural fruition: practicing managers developing themselves in small groups. 

In recent years I have shifted toward more general writing. I have done some newspaper commentaries (listed under Commentaries), and I like to write short stories, two of which are on this site: I hope to publish a collection of them one day. Some years ago, I published Why I Hate Flying, a spoof on the foibles of flying (now available in paperback as The Flying Circus).

In all, I have published about 150 articles (listed with annotations and, where available, web links, under Articles) and 15 books. Honors have included election as an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l'Ordre national du Quebec, selection as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management, and two McKinsey prizes for articles in the Harvard Business Review. Honorary degrees and other awards are listed in my full C.V. You can also see a piece I wrote on my career up to the early 1990s (1993 autobiography). I also collect "beaver sculptures." If you are interested in how I research, conceive, and write, please see "Developing Theory about the Development of Theory".

I may spend my public life dealing with organizations, but I prefer to spend my private life escaping from them. This I do on a bicycle (preferably on quiet roads in Europe), up mountains, and in the Laurentian wilderness of Canada atop cross-country skis or in a canoe. I like to do this with my wife Sasha, my daughters Susie and Lisa, and now with my grandchildren, Laura and Tomas.

View my C.V. (pdf: 6 pages)

View an autobiography (1993) (pdf: 40 pages)
Courtesy of Elsevier Science. Single copies can be downloaded and printed for personal research.

See a profile in Fast Company (November 2000)