Faculty
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding codirectors of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Malone teaches classes on organizational design, information technology, and leadership, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.
Malone predicted in an article published in 1987 many of the major developments in electronic business over the following 25 years, including electronic buying and selling for many kinds of products. In 2004, Malone summarized two decades of his research in his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work. His newest book, Superminds, appeared in May 2018. Malone has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He is the coeditor of four books.
Malone has been a cofounder of four software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He is also an inventor with 11 patents.
His background includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a PhD from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.
Malone, Thomas W. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
Riedl, Christoph, Thomas W. Malone, and Anita W. Woolley. MIT Sloan Management Review, October 21, 2021.
Riedl, Christoph, Young Ji Kim, Pranav Gupta, Thomas W. Malone, and Anita Williams Woolley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 118, No. 21 (2021): e20057371.
Lippel, Philip, Hirotaka Miura, Yara Komaiha, and Thomas W. Malone. Federation of American Scientists' Day One Project, Working Paper. 2021.
Jaeyoon Song, Christoph Riedl, and Thomas W. Malone. In Proceedings of the 2021 Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Yokohama, Japan: May 2021. Download Paper.
Song, Jaeyoon, Christoph Riedl, and Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6159-20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, July 2020.
Machine learning is a powerful form of artificial intelligence that is affecting every industry. Here’s what you need to know about its potential and limitations and how it’s being used.
‘Those ad-hoc interactions are what people miss in today’s work-from-home environment.’
Host Harry Litman speaks with Thomas Malone about the post-COVID future of workplaces and technology and his most recent book, "Superminds.”
"There are a lot of jobs and more and more every day in our new economy that really can be done, for the most part, from anywhere.”
"We learned ... last year that we really could do online a lot of that which we used to think we had to come to the office … to do."
"It's not where we work that matters the most; it's how the work is done and who is doing it."
