Faculty & Research
Diane J. Gherson

Diane J. Gherson

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration

Organizational Behavior
+1 (617) 496-3047
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Diane J. Gherson
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(617) 496-3047
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Ms. Gherson is a Senior Lecturer in Organization Behavior at the Harvard Business School. In December 2020, Diane retired as an officer of IBM after serving seven years as Chief Human Resources Officer, responsible for the people and culture of IBM's global workforce of 360,000. Ranked #3 on Forbes World’s Best Employer list, IBM is also ranked #3 Best Managed Company by the WSJ/Drucker Institute.

During her tenure as CHRO, Diane redesigned all aspects of the company’s people agenda and management systems to support a massive shift in the business portfolio, shaping a culture of continuous learning, innovation and agility. She championed the company’s global adoption of design thinking and agile methods at scale, as examples, driving a company-wide, co-created overhaul of performance management and for designing return to the workplace. Diane infused AI and automation across all HR offerings, resulting in hundreds of millions of annual net benefits, better employee experience and world-class employee engagement. She also achieved record industry-leading diversity results by pioneering non-degree hiring and apprenticeships for software programmers.

Diane's work has been profiled in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Business Insider, Fortune, the Economist and Forbes. Diane has also formed and led coalitions of CHROs to proactively advocate on Capitol Hill on social issues affecting employees, such as DACA, transgender inclusion, and health care cost transparency.

Diane was named HR Executive of the Year by HR Executive in 2018, and elected Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources (NAHR), the highest honor granted in the HR profession. She was recognized by Business Insider as one of the Top 100 People Changing the World of Business and also by HR Executive as a top 100 Tech Influencer.

Diane is a non-executive director on the Board of Ping Identity, a publicly-held software company, and serves as a Board member of the National Academy of Human Resources. She is an Executive Advisory Board Member at Semper Virens, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage human capital start-ups.

Prior to joining IBM in 2002, Ms. Gherson led the global compensation and performance practice at consulting firm (now called) Willis Towers Watson. Diane holds a Bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, University of Toronto and a Master’s degree in Industrial & Labor Relations from Cornell University.

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