AMY C. EDMONDSON

Nearing graduation from Harvard College over three decades ago, Amy Edmondson took a leap of faith and wrote a letter to a personal hero, seeking advice about employment. To her surprise, Buckminster Fuller wrote back. His letter arrived barely a week later with far more than advice. The legendary inventor, architect, and futurist offered her a job. Spending the next three years as Fuller's “chief engineer,” she developed an intense and enduring interest in what leaders and organizations can do to create a better world. Today, as the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, Edmondson studies leaders seeking to make a positive difference in the world through the work they do in organizations of all kinds. The research described in this book captures the central thread that has run through her academic career – creating work environments where people can team up and do their best work.

Edmondson has been on the Harvard faculty since 1996 and teaches courses in leadership, teaming, decision-making and organizational learning. Her more than 70 articles have been published in Harvard Business Review and California Management Review, as well as in academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and the Academy of Management Journal. Before her academic career, she was director of research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked with CEO Larry Wilson to design and implement change programs in large companies. In this role she discovered a passion for understanding how leaders can build organizations as places where people can innovate, learn, and grow. Edmondson's prior books – Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (2012), Teaming to Innovate (2013), Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (2016), and Extreme Teaming (2017) – explore the challenges and opportunities of teamwork in dynamic environments. Her first book, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (1986), clarifies Fuller's mathematical contributions for a nontechnical audience.

Edmondson's contributions to management research have been recognized by the 2018 Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigor and Relevance in the Study of Management, the 2017 Thinkers50 Talent Award, the 2004 Accenture Award for significant contribution to management practice, and the Academy of Management's Cummings Award for midcareer achievement in 2006. She has been named one of the most influential thinkers in management by the biannual Thinkers50 list since 2011 (#13 in 2017). HR Magazine has listed her as one of the 20 Most Influential International Thinkers in Human Resources. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, her AM in psychology, and her AB in engineering and design from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, George Daley, and their two sons.