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    Michael Beer

    Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

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    Michael Beer is Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and Chairman of TruePoint (formerly the Center for Organizational Fitness) a research based consultancy he co-founded. The firm works with senior executives who aspire to transform their organization into a high commitment and performance system through honest conversations about the organization's alignment with strategy and values.

    Beer’s teaching, research, and consulting activities are in the areas of organizational effectiveness, change, and human resource management. Before joining the faculty of the Harvard Business School, Mike founded and served as Director of the Organizational Research and Development Department at Corning Inc. The department was an internal consulting and research group that successfully helped Corning’s managers make a number of significant innovations in organizing and managing at the corporate and business unit level.

    Mike has authored nine books, written numerous book chapters and articles in academic and business journals. His most recent book, edited with Nitin Nohria, is Breaking the Code of Change. His previous book, The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, won the Johnson, Smith & Kinsley Award for the best book on executive leadership that year, and was a finalist for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award. Professor Beer has taught in many executive education programs at HBS, including the Advanced Management Program, the International Senior Management Program, and founded and led Managing Organizational Effectiveness and Change and Strategic Human Resource Management. In the early 1980s Mike led the development of the first required course in human resource management taught at a business school. He is the senior author of the groundbreaking book Managing Human Assets, the first to frame human resource management as a general management responsibility. Beer has also taught Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Decision Making and Ethical Values in the first year curriculum. His current research deals with how corporate leaders can transform their organization into high commitment and performance organizations through organization wide honest conversations about alignment and performance.

    Professor Beer is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the National Academy of Human Resources, the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association. His professional activities have included membership on the editorial boards of several journals, and the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management. Mike received several awards from professional association including the Academy of Management’s Schoalr-Practitioner Award for his career long pursuit of practical and actionable knowledge and the Distinguished Professional Contributions Award from the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He also received the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award from the American Psychological Foundation for his contributions to consulting psychology. Dr. Beer served on the Board of Directors of GTECH Corporation and has consulted with manufacturing, financial service, retail and professional service firms. Among these firms are: Merck, Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies, Becton Dickinson, IBM, Honeywell, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Owens Illinois, J. P. Morgan Chase, Ernst and Young, Deloitte & Touche, Smith & Nephew PLC, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, and Whitbread PLC. He is an accomplished speaker and teacher who has spoken and taught in numerous corporate management meetings, programs and professional meetings.

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    Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors
     
     

    1. Research Summary

      Developing Organizational Capabilities to Compete

      by Michael Beer

      Michael Beer's current research is concerned with how leadership teams can shape an effective high performing company capable of implementing its strategy and learning. Working in cooperation with Becton Dickinson, a global medical technology company, he and Russell Eisenstat developed a process that a top management team at the corporate or business unit level could use to diagnose and reinvent their organization. That process, called Organizational Fitness Profiling (OFP), has been applied in approximately eighteen corporations and over 150 units with these companies. Using action research methods, Beer and Eisenstat have been able to identify six core barriers to strategy implementation and change. Because these barriers are known to everyone but are undiscussible they have called them 'silent killers.' Their action research has also begun to identify a number of factors that materially influence the capacity of a company to reinvent itself. And, they have been able to use the many applications of OFP to improve its power in reshaping an organization's 'fitness' to compete.

      Beer and Eisenstat's findings have been reported in a number of cases, working papers, book chapters, and articles. The most recent article 'The Silent Killers to Strategy Implementation and Learning' appeared in the summer 2000 issue of The Sloan Management Review. Taken together, the findings and cases developed from Beer's and Eisenstat's research form the core of Strategic Human Resource Management, a program for senior human resource and line executives offered by the Harvard Business School.

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