Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born March 15, 1943) is an American sociologist who is a professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008 to 2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and named one of "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.

Early life

Rosabeth Moss was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Helen (Smolen) Moss, a schoolteacher, and Nelson Nathan Moss, a lawyer and small-business owner. She has a younger sister, Myra. Kanter described her childhood as "benign" and herself as ambitious, having written a novel and entered essay contests as early as 11 years old. The following year she received an MA in sociology and, in 1967, a PhD from the University of Michigan. Although Kanter later decided to pursue a career in business research,

Career

Kanter was assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis University from 1967 to 1973 and again from 1974 to 1977, visiting associate professor of administration at Harvard University, as well as professor of sociology at Yale University from 1977 to 1986. She served as editor of the Harvard Business Review from 1989 to 1992, the last academic to hold the job. She is chair and director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative.

Kanter's earliest work as a sociologist focused on utopian communities and communes in the United States. In her 1972 book, Commitment & Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective, she argued that the internal characteristics of a utopian community lead to its success or failure. Kanter defined a "successful" commune as one that lasted for longer than thirty-three years. After surveying ninety-one communal projects from the period between 1780 and 1860, she determined that communal groups such as the Shakers, Amana, and Oneida were among the most successful nineteenth-century communes. To explain their success, Kanter noted these groups' rituals and clear boundaries for membership, as well as the "commitment mechanisms" that utopians utilized: sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence. She concluded that the more that a utopian community asked of its members, the more cohesive and long-lasting it was.

Kanter has written numerous books on business management techniques, particularly change management; she also has a regular column in the Miami Herald.

She is known for her 1977 study of tokenism—how being a minority in a group can affect one's performance due to enhanced visibility and performance pressure. Her development of the concept of tokenism has greatly impacted work on minority experiences in the workplace, the paper has been cited 1,945 times. Her book Men and Women of the Corporation is a classic in critical management studies, bureaucracy analysis and gender studies.

Kanter was an economic adviser to Michael Dukakis in his 1988 bid for presidency.

She co-founded the Harvard University-wide Advanced Leadership Initiative, guiding its planning from 2005 to its launch in 2008 and serving as Founding Chair and Director from 2008-2018 as it became a growing international model for a new stage of higher education preparing successful top leaders to apply their skills to national and global challenges.

Kanter co-founded the consulting firm Goodmeasure Inc. and has served as chair since 1980. She advises CEOs of companies and has served on various business and non-profit boards. Her consulting clients have included large companies such as IBM, Gap Inc., Monsanto, British Airways, and Volvo. Kanter has spoken in national and international events along with Presidents, Prime Ministers and CEOs. Her main focus is speaking out on addressing educational dilemmas.

A July 2016 article in Management Today cited Kanter as "probably the first woman to attain indisputable management guru status." Kanter has interests in corporate strategies, self-confidence, and demographic shift. She has a fondness for conducting detailed research therefore earning the pseudonym, "The Thinking Woman's Michael Porter".

An article published in the San Diego Tribune on May 29, 2018, mentioned Kanter's idea that the happiest employees can solve the most difficult problems and make a positive change in the lives of people. In an interview with Business Insider in 2015, Kanter deplored the "miserable state of America's infrastructure which impaired the economy and affected American citizens."

Awards

  • Guggenheim Fellowship (1975)
  • First honorary degree awarded in 1978 by Yale University
  • C. Wright Mills Award (1977) for her book Men and Women of the Corporation, the year's outstanding book on social issues.
  • Academy of Management's Distinguished Career Award, Academy of Management (2001)
  • Holds 23 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities.

Personal life

Kanter's first husband, Stuart A. Kanter, whom she had married in her junior year at Bryn Mawr,

  • SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, named 10 best business books of 2009 by Amazon.com

Selected bibliography

  • Pdf from Norges Handelshøyskole (NHH), the Norwegian School of Economics.
  • Kanter, Rosabeth Moss (1 January 1995). World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0684811291.
  • Kanter, Rosabeth Moss (28 January 2020). Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. Public Affairs .

References

  • "An Interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter" in Strategy+Business, July 1999.
  • "Rosabeth Moss Kanter – The professor as business leader". Interview in the Ivey Business Journal, March/April 2006.
  • Leading Positive Change with Six Steps. Speech at a TEDx event, January 2013.