LAURA MORGAN ROBERTS is a Teaching Professor of Management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She previously served on the faculties of Harvard Business School and Antioch University’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change. Laura has also taught courses in organizational behavior, psychology, negotiations, group dynamics, and leadership and career development as a faculty affiliate of the University of Michigan; the Wharton School of Finance; the Tuck School of Business; Georgia State University; the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management; and AVT Business School (Copenhagen). She is currently a visiting scholar of Harvard Business School’s Gender Initiative, researching the influence of African American business leaders. Laura is also a cofounder of RPAQ Solutions, Inc., a research and consulting firm that brings strength-based practices to leaders who seek extraordinary performance and personal fulfillment.

Laura’s research examines how leaders cultivate positive identities in diverse work organizations. She has published research articles, teaching cases, and practitioner-oriented tools for strategically activating best selves in workplaces and communities. Her publications, “How to Play to Your Strengths” and “Creating a Positive Professional Image,” are among the most popular articles from Harvard Business Review and have been featured in several media outlets. Laura is an editor of Positive Organizing in a Global Society: Understanding and Engaging Differences for Capacity-Building and Inclusion (with Lynn Perry Wooten and Martin Davidson) and Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (with Jane Dutton).

Laura earned a BA in psychology (highest distinction and Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan.

ANTHONY J. “TONY” MAYO is the Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School. He currently teaches Leadership and Organizational Behavior and Authentic Leader Development in the MBA program. Previously, he was the course head of FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development), a required experiential, field-based course in the first year of the MBA program that is focused on leadership, globalization, and integration. Before his work on FIELD, he cocreated and taught the elective course Great Business Leaders: The Importance of Contextual Intelligence. In addition, Tony teaches extensively in leadership-based executive education programs.

He recently coauthored the second edition of the textbook Management, which features a new approach for teaching the core principles of management courses to undergraduate students based on the integration and dynamic interaction of strategic management, organizational design, and individual leadership. His previous coauthored works include In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century, which has been translated into six languages; Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership; and Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders: What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us about Leadership. These books were derived from the development of the Great American Business Leaders database that Dean Nitin Nohria and Tony created (see https://www.hbs.edu/leadership/20th-century-leaders/Pages/default.aspx).

Tony served as the Director of the Leadership Initiative from 2002 to 2018, and in this capacity, he oversaw several comprehensive research projects on emerging, global, and legacy leadership and managed a number of executive education programs on leadership development. He was a cocreator of the High Potentials Leadership Development, Leadership for Senior Executives, Leading with Impact, Maximizing Your Leadership Potential, and Leadership Best Practices programs and has been a principal contributor to a number of custom leadership development initiatives. He launched the executive coaching component for the Program for Leadership Development.

Before his current role, Tony pursued a career in database marketing, where he held senior general management positions at the advertising agency Hill Holliday, the database management firm Epsilon, and the full-service direct marketing company DIMAC Marketing Corporation. Most recently, Tony served as the General Manager of Hill Holliday’s Customer Relationship Management Practice. At Epsilon, he served as Acting Chief Executive Officer and had full responsibility for the delivery and management of strategic and database marketing services for Fortune 1000 companies and national not-for-profit organizations.

Tony completed his MBA from Harvard Business School and received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Boston College.

DAVID A. THOMAS took office as the twelfth President of Morehouse College on January 1, 2018, ushering in a new era of leadership for the school, the nation’s largest and most prestigious liberal arts college for men.

His appointment in October 2017 ended a six-month period of leadership transition at the college, which began in April when the board announced its national search for a new Morehouse president. Members of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees selected David for many reasons, including his visionary leadership as a business school administrator and his proven track record in fund-raising, which includes a capital campaign that raised more than $130 million in five years for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

David has thirty years of higher-education experience. He holds a doctorate in organizational behavior studies and a master of philosophy degree in organizational behavior, both from Yale University. He also has a master’s degree in organizational psychology from Columbia University, and a bachelor of administrative sciences degree from Yale College.

David is the former H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the former Dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. As Dean of Georgetown McDonough, David led 250 employees and more than two thousand students through a period of growth, which included a redesign of the MBA curriculum, the launch of the school’s first online degree program, and a $130 million capital campaign. He enhanced academic and professional opportunities for the school’s undergraduate and graduate students, including adding the Global Business Experience and an Office of Professional Development for undergraduates. He also increased the diversity of faculty and staff, launched new research initiatives, and boosted the school’s research funding.

Before Georgetown, David served for two decades as a professor and administrator at Harvard University. He returned in 2017 as the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a former Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to his work as an educator, David serves as a member of the Board of Directors of DTE Energy, the American Red Cross, and the Posse Foundation. He was the recipient of the Washington Business Journal’s 2014 Minority Business Leader of the Year award and the National Executive Forum’s Breaking Through: 2020, Beacon Award, among other honors. He has also worked as a consultant on issues relating to organizational change, diversity, and inclusion for one hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as major governmental and nonprofit organizations.

David is nationally renowned for his research on managing diversity in the workplace. He has written numerous case studies and academic articles on the subject. He is also the coauthor of two related books: Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, one of the first in-depth studies to focus on minorities who have made it to the top; and Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools.