Ed Morrison is director of the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama. The Lab develops new approaches to managing complex collaborations and networks. He is co-author of the book, Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership (Wiley, 2019).

Morrison started his career in Washington, DC, where he was legislative assistant to an Ohio congressman, staff attorney in the Office of Policy Planning for the Federal Trade Commission, antitrust attorney in the Commission’s Bureau of Competition and a member of the DC Bar. Later, he was staff counsel for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. In that role, he managed floor legislation involving tax, trade, and competitiveness.

After leaving Washington, he joined a corporate strategy consulting firm, founded by former partners of the Boston Consulting Group. In that role, he conducted strategy studies for Ford, Volvo, and General Electric, as they first came to grips with globalization. After his work as a corporate strategy consultant, Ed consulted with communities and regions across the U.S. tackling the complex challenges of building a prosperous economy in an era of globalization. In the 1990s, he also worked with joint ventures in China. Frustrated with existing approaches to these issues, more than 25 years ago he began working on a new methodology for developing strategy in open, loosely connected networks, now called Strategic Doing. This work aligns with what scholars now call “open strategy”.

Morrison’s work won the first Arthur D. Little Award for Excellence in Economic Development.
He designed private sector strategy for the transformation of the Oklahoma City economy; the launch of the Charleston Digital Corridor in Charleston, South Carolina; the launch for The Water Council in Milwaukee. He is now consultant to the Ministry of Production and Trade in Ecuador where the Ministry has adopted Strategic Doing to activate 22 industry clusters. His work on Strategic Doing has generated critical acclaim from both scholars and practitioners.

Morrison began his academic career in 2003 as director of the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University. In 2005, he moved to Purdue University, where he was a member of the professional staff at the Purdue Center for Regional Development. In 2016, he founded the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue. In 2020, he founded the Agile Strategy Lab at the University of North Alabama. He received his B.A. degree cum laude with Honors from Yale University and both his J.D and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Virginia. In 2021, he received his Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia). His dissertation is Strategic Doing: A Strategy Model for Open Networks (https://doi.org/10.25907/00087).