Faculty and Research

Robert G. Eccles first joined the faculty in 1979 and received tenure in 1989.  He left in 1993 for a career in the private sector and rejoined the faculty in September of 2007 as a Senior Lecturer. Right after receiving tenure, Dr. Eccles started doing research on corporate reporting, a topic which remains of great interest to him from a research, managerial practice and public policy perspective.  He has written two books on this subject, The ValueReporting Revolution: Moving Beyond the Earnings Game (with Robert H. Herz, E. Mary Keegan and David M. H. Phillips) and Building Public Trust: The Future of Corporate Reporting (with Samuel A. DiPiazza Jr.).  A third book, One Report: Integrated Reporting for a Sustainable Strategy, (with Michael P. Krzus) will be published in March 2010.  Dr. Eccles is also on the board of directors of XBRL International, Inc.  XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is the application of XML to corporate reporting and makes it easier for companies to report their results and for investors to access this information.

Dr. Eccles teaches the MBA elective "Leading Professional Service Firms," as well as the executive education program of the same name and the new executive education program “Building Client Management Capabilities in Professional Service Firms.”  He is in the process of making some significant changes in the MBA course, building on prior work which established some key principles for managing these types firms from an internal perspective.  He is focusing on the client-facing aspects of these firms and had developed a number of new cases on this topic.  Based on this course development work, in collaboration with Professor Das Narayandas in the Marketing Unit, Dr. Eccles is working on a book about professional service firms with the working title of Building Capabilities: Ensuring Long-Term Success in a Professional Service Firm. 

With Professor Amy Edmondson, Dr. Eccles has started a major research project on the transformation occurring to increase sustainability in the design and building industry. The global trend of urbanization is creating the need for new cities all over the world, especially in developing countries.  However, in order for the desired economic, sustainability and design objectives to be achieved, radically new approaches will be necessary.  Here Eccles and Edmondson are studying ambitious and innovative initiatives that are based on extensive collaborations of many different types of experts, use of leading-edge technologies, fundamentally different approaches to contracting and construction, and new ways for the public and private sectors and civil society to work together.  Current projects include case studies of the iconic Water Cube building in Beijing, built for the Olympic swimming competition, and PlanIT Valley, a new research city being built in Porto, Portugal by Living PlanIT.

Dr. Eccles also has a broad interest in China as part of the School's plans to build its executive education presence there.  He is Chairman of the new “Growing a Professional Service Firm” executive education program.  Dr. Eccles is also working on developing a “China Finance Leadership Program” for the CFOs of China’s largest market cap companies.

Dr. Eccles received an S.B. in Mathematics and an S.B. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973) and an A.M. (1975) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1979) from Harvard University.