Executive Committee

Professor Emeritus, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

   As of July 2008 Professor Emeritus 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 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 most recently 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, the Center for Creative Leadership [US]) and served on the Boards of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and P.B.Svigals & Associates (architects), as well as Trillium Asset Management (the first and largest independent social investing advisor).  He currently focuses his consulting contributions through his role as Director of Research and Senior Consultant at HarthillUK and of counsel to the Center for Creative Leadership.    

With regard to scholarship, Torbert’s 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) the national Alpha Sigma Nu award winning Managing the Corporate Dream (Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987); 2) the Terry Award Finalist book The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry (Sage, 1991); and 3) the April 2005 HBR article “Seven Transformations of Leadership” which won the worldwide Association of Executive Search Consultants Award for Best Published Research on Leadership and Corporate Governance.    

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 1991 won the first Carroll School MBA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2008 received the David L. Bradford Distinguished Educator Award from the Organization Behavior Teaching Society.  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, and of his closest friends, colleagues, and students.

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