Jay W. Lorsch: The academic who changed the corporate board room

Abstract

The contributions of Jay W. Lorsch, the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School to the fields of organizational change and organizational behavior, are far reaching and fundamental. He has written and edited 19 books (currently writing twentieth), and the list contains critical pieces including Organization and Environment (with Paul Lawrence) that won the Academy of Management's Book of the Year Award in 1969 and was reissued as a Harvard Business School Classic in 1986. The book is listed at number 6 among the 25 most influential books on management of the twentieth century, which include the works of giants like Frederick Taylor, Max Weber, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, and Peter Drucker. In addition, he has published dozens of articles and contributed scores of case studies to academia. Jay Lorsch has taught in all Harvard Business School's educational programs and chaired the doctoral program as well as countless other units and initiatives at Harvard. He has also acted as a consultant to Citicorp, Deloitte Touche, Goldman Sachs, and many others, and his research on and work with corporate boardrooms has changed the very nature in which they construct, function, and assess themselves. Lorsch was elected to the Corporate Governance Hall of Fame of the highly respected industry magazine Directorship in 2009. He serves on the Board of Trustees of Antioch College and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.