Faculty and Research

Tony Mayo is the Thomas S. Murphy Distinguished Research Fellow and a Lecturer in the Organizational Behavior unit of Harvard Business School (HBS).  He co-created and currently teaches a new MBA course called "Great Business Leaders:  The Importance of Contextual Intelligence" and teaches extensively in many leadership development executive education programs.  Tony also serves as the Director of the HBS Leadership Initiative.  The Leadership Initiative is an interdisciplinary center that strives to serve as a catalyst for cutting-edge research and course development on leaders and leadership.  He is the co-author of In Their Time:  The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20^th Century, which has been translated into 5 languages.  He is also the co-author of Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership and the newly released book Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders:  What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us About Leadership.  These books have been derived from the development of the Great American Business Leaders database that Professor Nitin Nohria and Tony created for the Leadership Initiative (see http://www.hbs.edu/leadership/database/index.html).

more

Featured Work

Entrepreneurs, Managers, and Leaders
What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us About Leadership

Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders examines the role that business leaders play in shaping industries and how evolving industries shape leaders.  This co-evolutionary process of leadership and industry development is told through the dynamic story of the growth of the American airline industry.  Entrepreneurs, who explored a variety of airline concepts in search of a viable business model, define the industry's early history.  As the industry evolved, a new breed of managers emerged who built a dominant business model that enabled their companies to grow dramatically.  Later, after the industry matured, leaders took center-stage as agents of change to develop new business models in an effort to rebuild and revitalize the industry. The lessons to be drawn from the experience of the airlines and their executives will be of interest to business leaders in industries across a wide spectrum. Despite the indelible mark that many individuals have made on their industry, writers on industry evolution-concerning the airlines or any other industry-have rarely factored in leadership as a way of explaining or understanding that evolution. Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders seeks to paint a fuller picture of the interdependent relationship between the actions of leaders, the context of their times, and the evolution of an industry.