Senior Executive Forum 2020 - Professors David Collis & Ethan Bernstein

For the past thirty years David J. Collis has been a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he is only the second full-time Adjunct Professor appointed at HBS. Previously, he was the MBA Class of 1958 Senior Lecturer and an Associate Professor in the Strategy group at the Harvard Business School, having also completed five years as the Frederick Frank Adjunct Professor of International Business Administration at the Yale School of Management and two years as a professor at Columbia Business School. The winner of the 50th Anniversary McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review in 2008, and a Harvard Business Review best-selling author, he is an expert on corporate strategy and global competition, and is the author of the recent books International Strategy: Context, Concepts and Choices; Corporate Strategy (with Cynthia Montgomery); and Corporate Headquarters (with Michael Goold and David Young). Professor Collis is on the faculty for several HBS Executive Education programs, including Strategy: Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, and chairs Corporate Level Strategy and Global Strategic Management.  As the author of over thirty articles and book chapters, his work has been frequently published in the Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and in many books including Managing the Multibusiness Company, International Competitiveness, and Beyond Free Trade. The nearly one hundred cases he has authored have sold over 1 million copies worldwide and his articles over a quarter of a million copies, with over 11,000 citations.

David Collis received an M.A. (1976) with a Double First from Cambridge University where he was the Wrenbury Scholar of the University. He graduated as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School, MBA (1978), and received a Ph.D. (1986) in Business Economics at Harvard University where he was a Dean's Doctoral Fellow. From 1978 to 1982 he worked for the Boston Consulting Group in London. He is currently a consultant to several major U.S. corporations, and on the Board of Directors of Cambridge in America, the Board of Trustees of the Hult International Business School, and the Advisory Boards of Walter Scott, Vivaldi Partners, Muzzy Lane and formerly of PICIS, Ocean Spray, and WebCT. He is also the cofounder of the elearning company E-Edge, and the advisory firm Ludlow Partners.

Ethan Bernstein is an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. He teaches the second-year MBA course in Managing Human Capital, the Harvard Business School Online course on Developing Yourself as a Leader, and various executive education programs. He previously taught the first-year MBA course in Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD), an MBA immersive field course in Tokyo on Innovation and Leadership through the Fusion of Digital and Analog, and a PhD course on the craft of field research. 

In an era when the nature of work is changing, Professor Bernstein studies the impact of workplace transparency—the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviors, output, and/or performance—on productivity, with implications for leadership, collaboration, organization design, and new forms of organizing. 

Professor Bernstein’s research has been published in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Annals, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Harvard Business Review, Research on Organizational Change and Development, and People + Strategy, and it has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, Inc., Forbes, Fast Company, Businessweek, Esquire, Nikkei Business, Nikkei Shimbun, Le Monde, Maeil Business (Korea), and TEDx Boston, among others. He is a 2014 HBR McKinsey Award Finalist, and his research has won awards including the inaugural J. Richard Hackman Dissertation Award, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior award, the Academy of Management’s 2013 Best Publication in Organization and Management Theory award, the Academy of Management's 2014 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior award, the Academy of Management's 2014 Best Paper Based on a Dissertation Award, the INGRoup 2014 Best Paper award, the 2013 Fredric M. Jablin Doctoral Dissertation Award from the International Leadership Association, the HBS Wyss Award, and the Susan G. Cohen Doctoral Research Award. 

Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Bernstein spent a half-decade at The Boston Consulting Group in Toronto and Tokyo. Tapped by Elizabeth Warren to join the implementation team at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he spent nearly two years in executive positions, including Chief Strategy Officer and Deputy Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets, at the newest United States federal agency. 

Professor Bernstein earned his doctorate in management at Harvard, where he also received a JD/MBA degree. While a doctoral student, he was a Kauffman Foundation Fellow in Law, Innovation, and Growth, and he remains a member of the New York and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He holds an AB in Economics from Amherst College, which included study at Doshisha University in Kyoto. 

Professor Bernstein is a self-declared culinary adventurer and avid cyclist, runner, skier, reader, and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me listener. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives in Newton with his wife, Maly (HBS MBA 2006), and two young sons.