Rebecca Henderson believes business enterprise is one of the most powerful forces on the planet when it comes to effecting positive change – but that it must move quickly if we are to successfully address the problems the world faces. One of the most articulate and insightful academic scholars on the influential role business can play in ensuring a more sustainable future, her research explores the strategic and organizational forces that lead to sustainable business.
The John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, Professor Henderson has a joint appointment at the Harvard Business School (HBS) in the General Management and Strategy units and is the Co-Chair of the Business and Environment Initiative. She is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and in 2018 was elected to both the American and British Academy of Arts and Sciences. For many years, her work focused on the difficulties large, successful organizations experience in attempting to respond to large-scale technological shifts. In this context, she worked with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical, IT, materials, and CPG firms to build a rich understanding of the ways in which effective leadership can enable strategic renewal. Her most recent research explores the ways in which firms can successfully respond to the next great challenge of building a sustainable economy. She is particularly interested in the role of organizational purpose in supporting accelerated innovation and exceptional productivity.
Professor Henderson has taught a wide variety of courses including “Reimagining Capitalism: Business and the Big Problems,” and also teaches in HBS’s Executive Education program. She is an advisor to some of the world’s leading companies in the sustainability space and was a board member of both Amgen and IDEXX Laboratories for many years. She speaks frequently to companies and in public forums around the world.
Her work has been featured in a range of scholarly journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Strategic Management Journal. She has edited three books: Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights from Multiple Sectors (University of Chicago Press, May 2011), Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Political Economy and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2022). It centers on how large complex organizations are undertaking changes in their business as they move to become more sustainable. Her newest book, Reimagining Capitalism in A World on Fire (Public Affairs, April 2020), offers a new intellectual framing for capitalism that has lost its moral and ethical foundations in the single-minded pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, suggesting that firms can simultaneously make a positive societal impact and deliver sustained financial performance whilst also helping to rebuild the institutions on which both prosperity and social well-being depend.
Previously, she was the Eastman Kodak Professor of Management at the Sloan School of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she ran the strategy group and taught courses in technology, strategy, and sustainability. She received an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in business economics from Harvard.
