Biography

Warren BENNIS

2007 ranking: 24

Now in his seventies, Warren Bennis still runs most days before work. His intellectual energy and output remains formidable. He is a humanist with high hopes for humanity. "I think that every person has to make a genuine contribution in their lives and the institution of work is one of the main vehicles to achieving this", he has said. "I'm more and more convinced that individual leaders can create a human community that will, in the long run, lead to the best organizations."

In the 1950s, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Warren Bennis (b. 1925) was a protege of Douglas McGregor, whose work on motivation influenced his later thinking. In the 1960s, Bennis' work - particularly his 1968 book The Temporary Society - explored new organizational forms, envisaging organizations as adhocracies - the opposite of bureaucracies. But it is for his work on leadership that he is best known.

In the 1980s Bennis and others brought a new rigor and vigor to a topic that had been previously neglected by management scholars. In a now famous study of 90 American leaders, he sought to identify the common traits of effective leaders. In place of the man or woman of destiny, he offered a view of leadership based on four factors: vision, meaning, trust, and the deployment of self.

He is now based at The Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California which in in May 2001 hosted a "festschrift" - a celebration of his 40-year career with a conference devoted to his scholarly work which included luminaries such as Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Tom Peters, as well as top business leaders, educators, and journalists. Bennis has made a contribution to an array of subjects and produced a steady stream of books including the bestselling, Leaders and, most recently, Old Dogs, New Tricks (with Ken Shelton, 1999).

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