Executive Committee

Professor, Boston College

Now Professor of Management at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, Bill Torbert has earlier served as the school’s Graduate Dean and Director of the PhD Program in Organizational Transformation. He currently teaches the MBA Leadership Workshop, an elective in Consulting, and a doctoral seminar in Action Research Methods. He is one of the founding faculty of the Executive Program Leadership for Change at Boston College, and is a founding Research Member of the international Society for Organizational Learning. Within the academy, he has served as Chair for the Organization Development & Change Division of the Academy of Management and on the Board of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society, as well having served on the founding Editorial Boards of numerous journals including currently the Journal of Action Research and Academy of Management Learning and Education.

Torbert has consulted widely (e.g. Odebrecht Construction [Brazil], Volvo and UBS Warburg [England], Lego [Denmark]) and has served on the Boards of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and P.B.Svigals & Associates (architects), as well as Trillium Asset Management.

With regard to scholarship, Torbert’s current (2004) Berrett-Koehler book, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership, presents his theories, cases, surveys, and lab and field experiments in regard to developmental transformation at both the personal and organizational levels, as well as within science itself, undergirded by an action research process exercised in real-time, everyday life, called “developmental action inquiry.” Unlike most purely third-person, analytic social science research, action inquiry integrates first-person, second-person, and third-person research/practice in real-time. His many other books and articles include: 1) his national Alpha Sigma Nu award winning Managing the Corporate Dream (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987); 2) his Terry Award Finalist book The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (Sage, 1991); and 3) Transforming Social Inquiry, Transforming Social Action, coedited with Francine Sherman (Kluwer, 2000).

Torbert received a BA, magna cum laude, in Political Science & Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences from Yale University, holding a Danforth Graduate Fellowship during his graduate years. He founded the Yale Upward Bound (War on Poverty) program and the Theatre of Inquiry, and taught at Yale, Southern Methodist University, and Harvard prior to joining the Boston College faculty in 1978. He won the Outstanding Professor Award at SMU in 1972, in 1989 won second place nationally as Distinguished Educator in OB, and in 1991 won the first Carroll School MBA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. Most of all, though, he takes great pleasure and pride (not to mention more than occasional pain) in the ongoing development of his three sons, Michael, Patrick, and Benjamin, of his closest friends, colleagues, and students, and of his own exploring-and-hiding self.

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