Mike Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and author Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company’s Capabilities are the Key to a Winning Strategy (2020). The book provides a road map for developing an effective hight commitment, high-performance organization capable of executing its strategy and living to its values
Mike is an internationally recognized expert in strategic change, founder of TruePoint Partners, a management consultancy, and the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership a not-for-profit CEO membership organization whose mission is to help leaders build companies that create economic and social value. You can learn more about Mike and his recent the book on his website.
Professor Michael Beer has written widely about organization effectiveness and change as well as human resource management and has had extensive consulting and teaching experience in those fields. At HBS, where he was on the faculty for thirty years he taught in Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program, the School’s pinnacle program for senior executives and its MBA program.
A groundbreaking human resource management course
Professor Beer also led the development of HBS’ ground-breaking human resource management course, the first in the world to frame human resource as a strategic responsibility of leaders, and the senior author of the foundational human resource book, Managing Human Assets, the first book to frame human resources as a strategic Asset.
Mike is author or co-author of twelve books, numerous book chapters and articles in academic and business journals. Among his books are: Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value which describes how leading edge CEOs manage companies that do well by doing good; High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage provides a roadmap for leaders who aspire to build a high commitment, high performance organization; The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal provides insights into what it takes to transform a corporation in response to completive challenges. It won the Johnson, Smith & Knisely Award for the best book on executive leadership in 1990 and was a finalist for The Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award in 1992.
Consulting and management expertise
Mike has consulted to senior management in several industries-manufacturing, services (hospitality, professional and financial), consumer packaging, high tech., pharmaceutical and medical technology. Among others, he has worked with Becton Dickinson, Hewlett Packard, Ernst & Young, Agilent Technologies, Merck, and Whitbread PLC. He has served on several professional, not-for-profit, and corporate boards.
The recipient of professional honours and awards, Dr. Michael Beer is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award, a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resource, the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and recipient of its Distinguished Professional Contributions Award, and recipient of the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award for outstanding contributions to organizational consulting psychology from the American Psychological Foundation.
He and Dr. Russ Eisenstat received the 1998 Organizational Development Institute Award for developing the Strategic Fitness Process. He is the 2007 recipient of the Society for Human Resource Management’s Michael R. Losey Research Award.
