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Clayton M. Christensen has a joint appointment in the Technology and Operations Management and General Management units. His research focuses on the management of technological innovation, developing organizational capabilities, and finding new markets for new technologies. His 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, won the Global Business Book Award for the best business book published that year. Christensen is currently head of the required General Management course.
Prior to joining the HBS faculty in 1992, Christensen served as chairman and president of Ceramics Process Systems Corporation (CPS), a firm he cofounded with several MIT professors in 1984. A former Boston Consulting Group project manager, he was instrumental in founding the firm's manufacturing strategy consulting practice. In 1982 he was named a White House Fellow and served as assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretaries Drew Lewis and Elizabeth Dole.
Christensen holds a BA with highest honors in economics from Brigham Young University and an M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He received an MBA with high distinction (1979) and a DBA (1992), both from HBS.
Stuart C. Gilson has been a member of the HBS faculty since 1991. His research focuses on how companies can create value by restructuring their assets, operations, and financial obligations in response to competitive challenges and major shifts in the business environment. He has written on a broad range of restructuring topics, including corporate bankruptcy and debt workouts, tracking stock, equity spin-offs, corporate downsizing, bank mergers, and employee buyouts. Currently, he is studying the factors that are driving the surge of restructuring activity in Europe and Asia and how managers can use restructuring techniques to help the stock market more accurately value their companies.
Gilson, who was previously on the finance faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, has taught courses in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and investment banking. At HBS he teaches the course Creating Value through Corporate Restructuring in the MBA and Executive Education Programs. He also chairs the executive program Finance for Senior Executives and has taught in the Advanced Management Program.
Gilson's research has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Financial Analysts Journal, and Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. His paper "Investing in Distressed Situations" received the 1995 Graham and Dodd Award. Gilson holds a BA in economics from the University of Manitoba, a master's in economics from the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Rochester.
Josh Lerner has a joint appointment in the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management units at HBS, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991. His research focuses on venture capital organizations and their role in transforming scientific discoveries into commercial products. Much of this research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, a forthcoming book from the MIT Press. He has also studied the impact of intellectual property protection, particularly patents, on the competitive strategies of firms in high-technology industries.
Venture Capital and Private Equity, an elective course Lerner developed and introduced into the HBS curriculum in 1993, has enjoyed widespread popularity and is now taught in two sections. In addition, he serves as faculty chair of the Focused Financial Management series, a set of targeted executive education courses, and designs and teaches an annual course for executives on private equity.
Before earning a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1991, Lerner worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, with a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He is a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research's Corporate Finance and Productivity Programs and co-organizes its Science and Technology Group.
A member of the HBS faculty since 1990, David A. Thomas teaches organizational behavior and human resource management. He is a noted authority on executive development, mentoring, and the challenges of creating and effectively managing a diverse work force. His articles and case studies on these topics have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and books, including the Harvard Business Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and The Handbook of Career Theory.
Together with his coauthor, HBS professor John J. Gabarro, Thomas recently published Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America. From 1993 to 1998, he taught and developed materials for the widely subscribed second-year elective, Self-Assessment and Career Development. The course uses cases, experiential exercises, and assessment instruments to guide students through an examination of their career interests and motivations and increases their understanding of how to manage their own careers.
Before joining the HBS faculty, Thomas was on the faculty of the Wharton School. He earned an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Yale University, as well as an MA in organizational psychology from Columbia University. He received a BA, with distinction, from Yale, where he was a Victor Wilson Scholar. Thomas consults and lectures widely on topics ranging from career and leadership development to major systems change and organizational design.
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