Donald Sull

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Donald Sull

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Donald Sull is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he directs the Strategic Agility Project and the Culture 500. He teaches courses on competitive strategy and strategy execution.

Prior to academia, he worked as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company, and as a management-investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.

The Economist named him “a rising star in a new generation of management gurus” and identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century. Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus.  He has published five books and over 100 cases and articles, including a dozen best-selling Harvard Business Review articles.

Sull is the cofounder of CultureX, which leverages proprietary AI to measure and improve corporate culture. He is the chairman of FilmFish and an advisor to several startups including Betterworks, Tomorrow.io, and eToro. He has advised top teams of more than fifty Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as non-business organizations ranging from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

Sull was formerly a Professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School, and earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate at Harvard University.

Publications

"Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation."

Sull, Donald, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig. MIT Sloan Management Review, January 11, 2022.

"How Are Innovation-Oriented Organizational Cultures Developed? The Importance of CEO Personality."

Cao, Xubo, Charles O'Reilly, and Donald Sull, Working Paper. January 2022.

"Organizational Culture Archetypes and Firm Performance."

Cao, Xubo, Charles O'Reilly, and Donald Sull. GSB Working Paper, Working Paper. January 2022.

"10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right."

Sull, Donald and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 16, 2021.

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