Faculty
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.
Sull, Donald, Stefano Turconi, and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, July 21, 2020.
Sull, Donald, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull. Harvard Business Review, March 2015.
Sull, Donald, William Cipolli, Caio Brighenti, and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review. Forthcoming.
Sull, Donald, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig. MIT Sloan Management Review, January 11, 2022.
Sull, Donald and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 16, 2021.
Sull, Donald, Charles O'Reilly, and Xubo Cao, Working Paper. 2021.
MIT Sloan senior lecturer Donald Sull explains why good work culture is more than just a list of core values in your mission statement.
How to define the right KPIs, why toxic culture is driving turnover, and more insights for leading in 2022.
"A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition ..."
Nhat Nguyen (MBA '21) says: "I love the mission of the company to unlock productivity for people by building innovative tools ... "
“Employees rightly walk in the door expecting to be respected—if that's violated it elicits a strong negative reaction and it's universal.”
" ... culture is on the minds of the employees that companies are trying to retain."
