Collaborative Leadership Program – Faculty

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 and was honored with the Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and leadership, and her articles have been published numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organizational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. Her new book,The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley, 2018), offers a practical guide for organizations serious about success in the modern economy.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller's mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

Robert Hanig is the President of The Society for Organizational Learning North America, a founding member of the Academy for Systems Change, and founder of RLH Consulting.  He was formerly a Vice President at Arthur D. Little (ADL), where he led the Leadership Practice, a Vice President at Innovation Associates, Inc. At ADL, Robert directed both the companies’ public training offerings and in-house programs for clients focused on Leadership Development and Large System Change. Robert’s client list includes: The World Bank Group, The International Monetary Fund, State Street, The Carnegie Corporation, Bharti Airtel, BP, Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), and the International Finance Corporation. He is a recognized master practitioner in the fields of Organizational Learning, Personal Mastery and Systems Change.

Prior to joining Innovation Associates, Mr. Hanig was President of D.M.A., Inc., an international training company working at the leading edge of individual and collective innovation.  He has also held senior management positions at companies including Apollo Computer/ Hewlett Packard and High Voltage Engineering.

Mr. Hanig’s  recent projects include the design and delivery of integrated leadership development programs and associated senior team interventions for the World Bank Group and the International Monterey Fund.   His approach encompassed and integrated three levels of leadership including: Executive, Managerial and Supervisory.  These award-winning programs have enjoyed unprecedented success in these institutions in terms of popularity with the target populations and applicability to real work challenges.  He is currently a member of a cross disciplinary team working with the New York City Department of Education to combine elements of Systems Thinking, Collective Impact and Equity in the K-12 context on the community, borough and regional levels.

Mr. Hanig has written various articles as well as contributed to books such as The Dance of Change co-authored by Peter Senge. His article in the June, 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review describes his key contribution to First Level Leaders, a worldwide leadership development program at BP. His expertise and services continue to be in high demand  and he has consulted with companies across the globe in areas including leadership, organizational learning and change, applied creativity, and dialogue.  He resides with his wife in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Dr. Srini Pillay works is the sciences, arts and technology. He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher and certified master executive coach who graduated at the top of his medical school class in South Africa, and as the most nationally awarded resident in his graduating year at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. He has been a physician for 30 years, and also works in biotechnology, researching drugs for cancer, heart diseases, stroke and neurodegenerative diseases. He was formerly the director of the Outpatient Anxiety Disorders Program at Mclean Hospital, the Director of the Panic Disorders Research Program at Mclean Hospital, and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Pillay is also the CEO of NeuroBusiness Group, a transformational neurocoaching company that was voted one of the Top 20 movers and shakers in leadership development in the world by Training Industry. He has taught in the executive education programs at Harvard Business School and Duke Corporate Education. Dr. Pillay is internationally recognized for brain-based transformational executive coaching, and is a member of a by-invitation-only think tank at McKinsey & Co., a member of the by-invitation-only Transformational Leadership Council, on the faculty of Mobius Executive Leadership, and is an appointed board member of FRED Leadership-a group that connects and inspires those who exemplify and cultivate ethical, inclusive and transformational leadership. His current clients include international non-profit multilaterals and Fortune 500 companies.

Recently, Dr. Pillay just completed writing a musical, is working on a Gospel Music and brain imaging leadership-related project with a leadership development expert at IBM and is also working on fashion and photography projects that integrate brain science. In 2019, he accepted a position as Chief Medical Officer of a virtual reality startup, Reulay, that aims to reduce stress and anxiety in corporations and has also signed with LinkedIn Learning to deliver online courses on depression, anxiety and addiction in the workplace, as well as the applications of neuroscience to leadership. He has also founded or co-founded six early-stage technology startups in 2019.

Dr. Pillay has authored several award-winning books including “Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear”, “Your Brain and Business: The Neuroscience of Great Leaders” and “Tinker Dabble Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind.” He is regularly invited to speak internationally and is also regularly featured in the media on television, in print and online including CNN, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Fortune, Forbes, Success, The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine. He has also presented a TEDx Talk – “WIRED FOR SUCCESS: The Science of Possibility”

Peter Senge has been at the forefront of organizational learning since publishing his classic text - The Fifth Discipline - in 1990. The Fifth Discipline provides the theories and methods to foster aspiration, develop reflective conversation, and understand complexity in order to build a learning organization. 

In 1997, Harvard Business Review named the learning organization as one of "the seminal business ideas of the prior 75 years." Peter is driven by the desire to understand how we can work together to live in harmony with one another and with Mother Earth. He continues to push the boundaries of our understanding of organizational learning- teaching his principles in workshops and seminars across the country. Peter describes his process as “sharing” rather than “teaching”, in an attempt to “help people see not just what has been done before, but sharing what has been done, by suggestion, surfacing or eliciting what new might be possible.” 

Throughout his career, Peter has been asking, “how do we create the best conditions, including the tools and methods, for enabling learning communities?” Since the publication of The Fifth Discipline, Peter has shared the driving principles of organizational learning with business, education, health care, and government. Through his work, Peter strives to foster learning communities around the globe in order to improve our world.

Considered by the Journal of Business Strategy as one of the 24 people who had the greatest influence on business strategy in the 20th Century; Peter is the founding chairperson of SoL and a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Peter graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in engineering. He holds an M.S. in social systems modeling and a PhD in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. 1990, The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization 1994, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook 1999, The Dance of Change 2000, Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares about Education 2004, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future 2005, Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, 'Organizations, and Society' 2008, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World