Biography

Chris ARGYRIS

2007 ranking: 48

Harvard Business School's Chris Argyris is the father of the learning organization though MIT's Peter Senge tends to receive most of the plaudits. Argyris' work has never become populist though it has retained its popularity. He has pursued an admirably independent line, coaxing ideas along rather than detonating them in front of gasping audiences. His best work has a knack of infiltrating the underside of organizations - and, more depressingly, human behavior. A convinced romantic, he believes people's potential can - and should - be fulfilled. Along with Donald Schon, he introduced the concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning.

Argyris' key books are Personality and Organization (1957) and Organizational Learning (with Donald Schon, 1978). In his most recent book Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not (1999) Argyris turns his attention towards the field of organizational change. He is clearly unimpressed with much of the current advice, opinion and commentary handed down by academics, consultants and commentators believing that it, "does not work. . . . It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings."

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