Richard Walton joined Harvard in 1968 and currently teaches courses in general
management and organization. He has also taught in executive programs in Asia
and Europe. He consults with many leading American corporations and is a
Director of Champion International Corporation.
The author of eight books and more than six dozen articles, his recent interests
have included social innovations that elicit high employee commitment, enhance
business performance, and promote human development. He has been active as an
architect of theses innovations and as a researcher. Several recent books by
Professor Walton treat issues central to the competitiveness of business firms.
One book, Innovating to Compete: Lessons for Diffusing and Managing Change in
the Workplace (1987), presents a general framework explaining the innovative
capability of a national industry. It is based on an analysis of work
innovations - flexibility and participation - in the maritime industry. These
shipboard innovations reduce crew sizes and help shipowners compete for deep-sea
shipping trade. The study compares and explains the innovation records over the
past 20 years in eight traditional maritime countries: Norway, Holland and
Japan, which were high innovators; Sweden, West Germany and the U.K., which were
moderate innovators; and Denmark and the U.S., which were low innovators.
Another book, Up and Running: Integrating Information Technology and the
Organization (1989), presents a practical theory for effective implementation of
advanced information technology in plants, offices, and executive suites. It
uses the experiences of such diverse organizations as AT&T, IBM, GE, Shell Oil,
Rolls Royce, DEC, Eastman Kodak, Thorn EMI, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service,
and ten others, to provide concrete illustrations of the variety of ways in which
information technology (IT) and organization dynamics can impinge upon one
another, both positively and negatively, depending upon implementation choices.
Professor Walton's latest book, Strategic Negotiations: A Theory of Change in
Labor-Management Relations (1994) with Robert McKersie and Joel
Cutcher-Gershenfeld proposes a theory of strategic negotiation. By strategic
negotiation we refer to the importance of the transformation involved -- major
revisions in the social contract between management and labor as well as in the
collective bargaining agreement. The book presents this theory and uses it to
analyze thirteen case histories of negotiated change drawn from three industries
which offer especially instructive contrasts -- pulp and paper, auto supply and
railroads.