Full Name
Charles Heckscher
Board of Education/Business Name
Rutgers University
Job Title
Distinguished Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations (LSER); Director, Center for the Study of Collaboration in Work and Society
Speaker Bio
Charles Heckscher is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and co-Director of the Center for the Study of Collaboration. Before coming to Rutgers he worked for the Communications Workers’ Union, taught Human Resources Management at the Harvard Business School, and was a board member of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. He has also taught courses at the Wharton School and Sciences-Po (Paris).
His recent work has centered on trust – its conditions, development, and the nature of communities that support it. His book, Trust in a Complex World (Oxford University Press 2015) explores how to reconcile growing diversity with the increasing need for trust across the globe. It won the 2016 George R. Terry Award from the Academy of Management as “the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years.”
Prior to that his work focused on organization change and the development of collaboration. In the early 1990s he coordinated a group at the Harvard Business School which produced The Post-Bureaucratic Organization (Sage, 1994). In the late ‘90s, at Rutgers University, he hosted a series of experience-sharing meetings of corporate leaders from companies including Shell, ABB, Lucent, and the World Bank, who were venturing into unexplored territory of complex teamwork and strategic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 he was a member of a small group sponsored by McKinsey seeking a practical approach to “opportunity-based design” which developed an analysis of the relation between new strategic demands and organizational structures based on a wide range of cases from Europe and the US. He then led another group in a series of discussions on “collaborative community,” which led to a collective book published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Throughout this period he gathered interviews and case materials on a wide range of organizations, including Citibank’s Ecommerce group and the development of its global banking capability, IBM’s values initiative, Shell Oil’s new ventures group, and many others. These were brought together in a theory of organization in The Collaborative Enterprise (2007).
He has consulted to managers in a wide range of companies, including AT&T, Lucent, Volvo, IBM, PSE&G, Sunoco, and many others. He has also worked with unions including (among others) the Communications workers, the United Steelworkers of America, the National Education Association, and the AFL-CIO.
His other books include The New Unionism, White-Collar Blues (on the transformation of the role of middle management), and Agents of Change (on organization intervention).
His recent work has centered on trust – its conditions, development, and the nature of communities that support it. His book, Trust in a Complex World (Oxford University Press 2015) explores how to reconcile growing diversity with the increasing need for trust across the globe. It won the 2016 George R. Terry Award from the Academy of Management as “the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years.”
Prior to that his work focused on organization change and the development of collaboration. In the early 1990s he coordinated a group at the Harvard Business School which produced The Post-Bureaucratic Organization (Sage, 1994). In the late ‘90s, at Rutgers University, he hosted a series of experience-sharing meetings of corporate leaders from companies including Shell, ABB, Lucent, and the World Bank, who were venturing into unexplored territory of complex teamwork and strategic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 he was a member of a small group sponsored by McKinsey seeking a practical approach to “opportunity-based design” which developed an analysis of the relation between new strategic demands and organizational structures based on a wide range of cases from Europe and the US. He then led another group in a series of discussions on “collaborative community,” which led to a collective book published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Throughout this period he gathered interviews and case materials on a wide range of organizations, including Citibank’s Ecommerce group and the development of its global banking capability, IBM’s values initiative, Shell Oil’s new ventures group, and many others. These were brought together in a theory of organization in The Collaborative Enterprise (2007).
He has consulted to managers in a wide range of companies, including AT&T, Lucent, Volvo, IBM, PSE&G, Sunoco, and many others. He has also worked with unions including (among others) the Communications workers, the United Steelworkers of America, the National Education Association, and the AFL-CIO.
His other books include The New Unionism, White-Collar Blues (on the transformation of the role of middle management), and Agents of Change (on organization intervention).
Speaking At
