Faculty & Research
Eugene F. Soltes

Eugene F. Soltes

Professor of Business Administration

Professor of Business Administration

Accounting and Management
+1 (617) 495-6480
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Eugene F. Soltes
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(617) 495-6480
Featured Work Publications Awards & Honors

Eugene Soltes is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where his work focuses on corporate integrity. His research utilizes data to proactively identify organizational cultures and compliance systems that can effectively prevent, detect, and respond to reputational and regulatory threats. Professor Soltes teaches graduate and executive education courses on corporate misconduct and risk management, and was the recipient of the Charles M. Williams Award for outstanding teaching.

Professor Soltes is the author of the bestselling book Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, which was described by Kirkus Reviews as “a groundbreaking study” on white-collar criminality. Based on years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, the book refutes popular explanations of why seemingly successful managers engage in misconduct by showing that many make decisions on the basis of intuitions and gut feelings. The trouble, Professor Soltes shows, is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world.

Professor Soltes is a leader in utilizing data analytics to predict, detect, and mitigate issues related to organizational misconduct. He frequently serves as an advisor and consultant to multinational corporations regarding the design of their compliance programs, and is routinely invited to speak to regulators, including the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the United States Treasury. Drawing on his experience with companies and government agencies, Professor Soltes founded Integrity Lab, which creates integrated, data-driven technology to cultivate organizational integrity and strengthen corporate culture.

Professor Soltes’ contributions have been widely cited by the media including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, NPR, and The Economist. He is also on the editorial board of Harvard Data Science Review.

Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard Business School, Professor Soltes received his PhD and MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his AM in statistics and AB in economics from Harvard University.

Professor Soltes lives in Cambridge with his wife, a rheumatologist, and two young children.

 

Featured Work
Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal

"A spectacular achievement" - Library Journal

From the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, the failings of corporate titans are regular fixtures in the news. But what drives wealthy and powerful people to white-collar crime? Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes draws from extensive personal interaction and correspondence with nearly fifty former executives as well as the latest research in psychology, criminology, and economics to investigate how once-celebrated executives become white-collar criminals. The product of seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history, Why They Do It is a breakthrough look at the dark side of the business world.

Soltes reveals how the usual explanations fail to tell the whole story of why many seemingly successful people go over the line. White-collar criminals are not merely driven by excessive greed or hubris, nor do they usually carefully calculate costs and benefits before breaking the law. Instead, Soltes shows that most of the executives who committed crimes made decisions the way we all do—on the basis of their intuitions and gut feelings. The trouble is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions and the individuals they impact.

With the increasing globalization of business threatening us with even more devastating corporate misconduct, the lessons Soltes draws in Why They Do It are needed more urgently than ever.


Books
Journal Articles
Articles
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Awards & Honors
Received the 2015 Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Winner of the 2015 Hillcrest Behavioral Finance Award from Hillcrest Asset Management for “Being Surprised by the Unsurprising: Earnings Seasonality and Stock Returns” with Tom Chang, Samuel Hartzmark, and David Solomon.
Winner of the Best Paper Award at the 2015 California Corporate Finance Conference for “Being Surprised by the Unsurprising: Earnings Seasonality and Stock Returns” with Tom Chang, Samuel Hartzmark, and David Solomon.
Winner of the 2012 Best Paper Award from the Financial Research Association for "What Are We Meeting For? The Consequences of Private Meetings with Investors" with David Solomon.
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