MIT Sloan Alumni Online: Ben Shields

Join MIT Sloan Alumni Online this season for a series of interviews with principled, innovative leaders who improve the world. Jackie Selby, EMBA '21, hosts a conversation with Ben Shields on Leadership and the Intersection of Sports and Analytics. 

Ben Shields is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His work as a teacher, researcher, and practitioner focuses on digital transformation in the sports, media, and entertainment industries.

He teaches a number of courses in the graduate programs at MIT Sloan. He created and teaches Creative Industries: Media, Entertainment, and the Arts; Social Media Management; and Sports Strategy and Analytics. He also teaches Communication for Leaders and co-teaches the Sloan Fellows Seminar on Leadership. In 2020, he received MIT’s Teaching with Digital Technology award. In 2022, he received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, MIT Sloan's most prestigious teaching award.

Ben also teaches in the MIT Sloan Executive Education program. He is the Faculty Director of the Global Executive Academy, a two-week program focused on leadership that convenes executives from around the world. In addition, he developed and teaches the open enrollment program Data-Driven Teams: The Art and Science of Winning. He also teaches in two other open enrollment programs: Communication and Persuasion in the Digital Age and Maximizing Your Personal Productivity. 

He is the author or coauthor of three books, Social Media Management: Persuasion in Networked Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High Performance Industry (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace (McGraw-Hill, 2006). He has also coauthored MIT Sloan case studies on Formula 1 and the National Women's Soccer League.

Prior to MIT Ben served as the Director of Social Media and Marketing at ESPN.

He holds a BS and MA in communication studies and a PhD in media, technology, and society, all from Northwestern University.