Faculty
Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies, and the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Her pioneering research into how successful teams operate has highlighted the critical importance of managing outside, as well as inside, the team’s boundary. This research directly led to the concept of X-Teams as a vehicle for driving innovation within large organizations. Ancona’s work also focuses on the concept of distributed leadership and on the development of research-based tools, practices, and teaching/coaching models that enable organizations to foster creative leadership at every level.
She is the author of the book, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press) and the related article, “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” (Harvard Business Review). In addition to X-Teams, her studies of team performance have also been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the MIT Sloan Management Review. Her previous book, Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing), centers on the skills and processes needed in today’s diverse and changing organization. Ancona has served as a consultant on leadership and innovation to companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bose, Takeda, Li & Fung, OCP, Accenture, ASA, and has served on the Board of the Penn Graduate School of Education and the working group of the Canadian Council of Academies.
Ancona holds a BA and an MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management from Columbia University.
Ancona, Deborah L., and Henrik Bresman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2023.
Ancona, Deborah L. and Henrik Bresman. MIT Sloan Management Review, December 13, 2022.
Ancona, Deborah, and Dennis N.T. Perkins. Harvard Business Review, January 2022.
Ancona, Deborah L., Henrik Bresman, and Mark Mortensen. Journal of Management Studies Vol. 58, No. 1 (2021): 287-291.
Ancona, Deborah L., Michele Williams, and Gisela Gerlach. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 8, 2020.
Ancona, Deborah. MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2020.
MIT Sloan’s Deborah Ancona explains how leaders can start, manage, and support externally oriented innovation within their organizations.
Uncertainty will abound in 2023. Focus now on resilience, agility, examining external factors, and innovation in artificial intelligence.
This profile of professors Andrew W. Lo and Deborah Ancona examines their research, careers, and the ideas that define their work.
Professor Deborah Ancona said: "Sense-making is most often needed when our understanding of the world becomes unintelligible in some way. This occurs when the environment is changing rapidly, presenting us with surprises for which we are unprepared or confronting us with adaptive, rather than technical problems to solve."
Ideally, companies would remove layers and spread decision-making throughout the organization so that those closest to customers or technology, for example, could generate ideas and make decisions, professor Deborah Ancona said. "You're kind of flipping the organization," she said. "Rather than all the ideas coming from on high, you have entrepreneurial leaders who are lower down in the organization coming up with new ideas."
Deborah Ancona discusses the essential skills of inquiry, advocacy, and connecting that leaders can use to foster trust.
This online short course provides a step-by-step guide to the 4-CAPS+ Leadership Framework, developed by Faculty Director Deborah Ancona and her colleagues at MIT. The framework provides key insights into the skills required for effective leadership.
Digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how technology, people, and processes combine to create and deliver value. This exciting digital transformation education course introduces the concept of Algorithmic Business Thinking as a toolkit, mindset and digital language for uniting and augmenting your human and digital capabilities that helps you discover and uncover new opportunities throughout your digital transformation journey.
