Jay Lorsch

Jay W. Lorsch is the Louis Kirstein Professor of Human Relations at the Harvard Business School. He is editor of The Future of Boards: Meeting the Governance Challenges of the Twenty-First Century (2012) He is the author of over a dozen books, the most recent of which are Back to the Drawing Board: Designing Boards for a Complex World (with Colin B. Carter, 2003) and Aligning the Stars: How to Succeed When Professionals Drive Results (with Thomas J. Tierney, 2002).His Organization and Environment(with Paul R. Lawrence) won the Academy of Management's Best Management Book of the Year Award and the James A. Hamilton Book Award of the College of Hospital Administrators in 1969. Lorsch is known for having introduced contingency theory to the field of organizational behavior. He is a member of the Board of Directors of New Sector Alliance as well as The Antioch Review National Advisory Board. He formerly served on the boards of Benckiser (now Reckitt Benckiser), Blasland Bouck & Lee Inc., Brunswick Corporation, Sandy Corporation, and CA, Inc. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Antioch College and Cambridge at Home, as well as the Global Advisory Board of the Women's Tennis Association. He received the B.A. degree (1955) from Antioch College, the M.S. degree (1956) in business from Columbia University, and the D.B.A. (1964) from Harvard Business School. He was co-chair (with Martin Lipton and Larry Sonsini) of the project on Corporate Responsibility and co-edited (with Leslie Berlowitz and Andy Zelleke) the project's report, Restoring Trust in American Business (MIT Press, 2005). Lorsch co-authored (with Martin Lipton) the report's chapter on "The Professionalization of Corporate Directors." He also took part in the project on Challenges to Business in the 21st Century and co-edited (with Gerry Rosenfeld and Rakesh Khorana) the resulting publication (2009).