Rosabeth Moss Kanter

People Are the Greatest Resource

How did a woman who began her career in the 1960s studying communes and other utopian settlements end up shaping the real world decisions of some of the most successful U.S corporations? Part of the answer is that many ideas about organizations first raised in the 1960s have now found a receptive audience in corporate boardrooms across the country. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, has helped businesses learn to reorganize for greater success and higher profits. For her work, Kanter has been honored with numerous honorary doctoral degrees, and she has been profiled in various national publications. Her achievements rank her among our nation’s most influential women. Kanter divides her career between academic duties and Goodmeasure, Inc., a corporate ca, and now very large companies are figuring out how to divide themselves into small units. Many ideas and values of the ’60s have been translated into the workplace. Take, for example, the right of workers to free expression, the desirability of participation and teamwork, the idea that authority should not be obeyed unquestioningly, the idea that smaller can be better because it can createownership and family feeling. All of these are now mainstream ideas.

Sources: Murray (1984) and McHenry (1985).