About the Author

Stew Friedman joined the Wharton School faculty in 1984. He became the Management Department’s first Practice Professor in recognition of his work on the application of theory and research to the real challenges facing organizations. He is the founding director of both the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project. In 2001, Stew concluded a two-year assignment (while on leave from Wharton) at Ford Motor Company, where he was the senior executive for leadership development. In partnership with the CEO, he launched a corporate-wide portfolio of initiatives to transform Ford’s culture, in which over twenty-five hundred managers per year participated. Following these efforts, a research group (ICEDR) described Ford as a “global benchmark” in leadership development.

Stew’s writings on leadership development and succession, work/life integration, and the dynamics of change include the widely cited Harvard Business Review articles “Work and Life: The End of the Zero-Sum Game” (coauthored with Perry Christensen and Jessica DeGroot) and “Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life,” and, in the Academy of Management Executive, “The Happy Workaholic: A Role Model for Employees” (with Sharon Lobel). His books include Integrating Work and Life: The Wharton Resource Guide, in which he co-edited (with Jessica DeGroot and Perry Christensen) the first collection of learning tools for building leadership skills that integrate work with the rest of life. Work and Family—Allies or Enemies? (coauthored with Jeff Greenhaus) was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the field’s best. His national bestseller, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, has sold over sixty thousand copies, is now available in six languages, and is the basis for a massive open online course (MOOC) that reaches tens of thousands worldwide (on coursera.org). Stew’s latest book, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, is a landmark twenty-year longitudinal study that revealed surprising differences between Gen Xers and Millennials.

Stew has advised many organizations, including the US Departments of Labor and State, the U.N., and two White House administrations. He gives high-energy keynote speeches, conducts interactive workshops, and is an award-winning teacher. The New York Times cited the “rock star adoration” he inspires in his students. He was chosen by Working Mother as one of America’s twenty-five most influential men in having made things better for working parents and by Thinkers50 as one of the “world’s top 50 business thinkers.” The Families and Work Institute honored him with a Work Life Legacy Award in 2013. Follow him on Twitter @StewFriedman. Tune in to his show, Work and Life, on SiriusXM 111, “Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School,” Tuesdays at 7:00 p.m. (EST).

Stew played music and drove a taxi in New York during college and for a year thereafter, then worked for five years as a mental health professional in Vermont and New York before earning his PhD (1984) in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan.