Biography

Tammy ERICKSON

2009 ranking: 46

Tammy Erickson

Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and widely respected expert on organizations and the changing workforce—on the shifting relationship between individuals and corporations—and on enhancing innovation and workforce productivity. Her work is based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration.

Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles: “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), winner of the McKinsey Award, “Managing Middlescence” (March 2006), “What It Means to Work Here,” (March 2007), and “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” (November 2007), as well as the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). She has also co-authored an MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams,” (Summer 2007). She also authored one of Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2008, “Task, Not Time,” (February 2008).

Tammy is currently writing a trilogy of books on how individuals in specifi c generations can excel in today’s workplace. Her fi rst, Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation, was released early in 2008. Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work was released in October 2008. The third, for Generation X, will be available in the fall of 2009. Her blog “Across the Ages” is featured weekly on HBSP Online.

The research initiatives she and colleagues have undertaken include Demography is De$tiny, exploring the implications of current demographic changes on human resource practices, and The New Employee/Employer Equation, developing new and powerful approaches to increasing employee engagement through segmentation. Her most recent research, Cooperative Advantage, done in collaboration with a team at London Business School, explored the working practices of over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals, representing the most extensive academically-grounded study of industry-based team working ever conducted.

She is also a respected authority on technology and its implications for business and coauthor of the book Third Generation R&D: Managing the Link to Corporate Strategy, a widely accepted guide to making technology investments and managing innovative organizations.

Tamara is a former member of the Board of Directors of PerkinElmer, Inc., a Fortune 500 company competing in advanced technology markets, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Allergan, Inc.

Tamara holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago and a MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration where she was the recipient of the James Thomas Chirurg Fellowship.

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