Mike Beer is Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, co-founder and Director of TruePoint Partners, a management consultancy that works with senior executives to develop effective high performance and commitment organizations, and the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership, a not for profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of companies and leaders committed to creating economic and social value. Mike has researched and written widely about organization effectiveness, organizational change, high commitment, high performance organizations, leadership, as well as human resource management. Mike has had extensive teaching and consulting experience in those fields. 

Professor Beer has taught in HBS’ MBA program and executives in the Advanced Management Program, the International Senior Management Program and Managing Organizational Effectiveness and Change, which he founded and chaired.  Mike taught and led first year MBA courses in organizational behavior and human resource management; the latter developed under Mike’s leadership is the first required HRM course in business schools with a strategic general management perspective.

In addition to numerous book chapters and articles in academic and business journals, Mike is author or co-author of eleven books. Among them is the ground breaking Managing Human Assets and the award winning The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal. His most recent books are High Commitment, High Performance in 2009, and Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value published in 2011.

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. Mike has served on several professional, not-for-profit and corporate boards.

The recipient of professional honors and awards, Mike is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and the recipient of its Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award, a Fellow of the Academy of Human Resource Management, a Fellow of 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 is the 2007 recipient of the Society for Human Resource Management’s prestigious Michael R. Losey Research Award and the 2013 recipient of the Herbert Heneman Jr. Career Achievement Award from the Human Resource Division of the Academy of Management. Mike and Russ Eisenstat received the 1998 Organizational Development Institute Award for the most outstanding contribution to the field for the development of the Strategic Fitness Process at Becton Dickinson and its application there and in numerous other corporations around the world..

Prior to joining the Faculty at Harvard, Mike served as Director of Organizational Research & Development at Corning Inc., a department he founded and led for eleven years.  The work of the department led to several innovations in organizing and managing the company’s businesses and people.  He holds a B.A. from Queens College, a BA from Harvard University (honorary), an M.S. from North Carolina State University, and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology and business from Ohio State University.