Faculty and Research

Michael Tushman holds degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.E.E.), Cornell University (M. S.), and the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. (Ph.D.).  Tushman was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998; he was the Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business from 1989 to 1998.  He has also been a visiting professor at MIT (1982, 1996) and INSEAD (1995-1998). In 2008 Tushman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva.

Professor Tushman is internationally recognized for his work on the relations between technological change, executive leadership and organization adaptation. His work centers on the role of senior teams in building organizations that can host both incremental as well as more discontinuous innovation as well as leading those organizational changes associated with these innovation streams. His work on ambidextrous organizational designs focuses on those organizational and senior team characteristics that enable firms to both exploit current capabilities as well explore into new spaces. He has published numerous articles and books including Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Renewal and Change (with C. O'Reilly), Harvard Business School Press, 1997, 2002; Navigating Change: How CEOs, Top Teams, and Boards Steer Transformation (with D. Hambrick and D. Nadler, 1998), Harvard Business School Press; Competing by Design: A Blueprint for Organizational Architectures (with D. Nadler), Oxford University Press, 1998; and Managing Strategic Innovation: A Collection of Readings (with P. Anderson), Oxford University Press, 1997, 2004.

Tushman teaches courses on leading innovation and organization effectiveness and on leading strategic innovation and change. At Columbia, he won the first W. H. Newman Award for excellence and innovation in the classroom.  At Harvard, Tushman is involved in comprehensive and focused executive education programs, the MBA program, as well as the doctoral program. He has supervised many doctoral students, several who have won national awards for their dissertation research. He is currently the chair of the Advanced Management Program.

Tushman is an active consultant and instructor in corporate executive education programs around the world.  His clients have included: Hewlett-Packard, Agilent, GKN, Roche, Novartis, Pfizer, The World Bank, General Electric, BOC, Merck, Ericsson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Xerox, GTE, ALCOA, Tele Finland, Anglo-American, IBM, Neste, USPS, Corning, and AT&T.  Tushman has also worked with executive programs at California Institute of Technology, Berkeley, Nomura School of Business (Tokyo), Stanford, Chalmers University, INSEAD, IMI (Geneva), Wharton, the Australian Institute of Management, and the American Electronics Association. Tushman was senior advisor to the Delta Consulting Group and past trustee of IBM Credit Corporation.

Professor Tushman has also served on the boards of many scholarly journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Management Studies, Organizational Dynamics, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. He has also served as chairperson of the Organization and Management Theory and the Technology and Innovation Management Divisions of the Academy of Management. Tushman was elected Fellow of the Academy of Management in 1996, and received the distinguished scholar awards in both the Technology and Innovation Management (1999) and Organization Management and Theory (2003) Divisions of the Academy of Management. His paper with Mary Benner won the Academy of Management Review’s best paper award in 2004. In 2005, Tushman was named Lecturer of the Year at CHAMPS, Chalmers University of Technology.