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.
Featured Publication
"How to Fix a Toxic Culture."Sull, Donald, and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 28, 2022.
Featured Publication
"Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture."Sull, Donald, William Cipolli, Caio Brighenti, and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, March 16, 2022.
Sull, Donald, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig. MIT Sloan Management Review, January 11, 2022.
Cao, Xubo, Charles O'Reilly, and Donald Sull, Working Paper. January 2022.
Cao, Xubo, Charles O'Reilly, and Donald Sull. GSB Working Paper, Working Paper. January 2022.
Sull, Donald and Charles Sull. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 16, 2021.
Machine learning, hybrid work, and even layoffs can offer companies a chance to promote a positive work culture.
Uncertainty will abound in 2023. Focus now on resilience, agility, examining external factors, and innovation in artificial intelligence.
“Work design increases the likelihood of toxic culture."
"Preparing Your Company for the Next Recession" by Senior Lecturer Donald Sull and Charles Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review.
"Uncertainty surges dramatically during recessions. Our research has identified three fundamental ways to manage uncertainty."
Donald Sull and co-author found that a toxic workplace was the main cause of turnover in their survey sample.
The Global CEO Program has been run since 2011 by IESE Business School in partnership with other leading business schools from around the world. Starting with this 2023–2024 edition, the program will be offered as a powerful alliance between IESE and the MIT Sloan School of Management, two of the world’s most renowned institutions of higher learning for global business executives. The Global CEO Program includes three one-week residential modules on three continents: North America, Asia and Europe.
