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Donald Sull (born 9 December 1962) is an American academic, consultant, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on how organizations respond to changes in their marketplace. Sull is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches Competitive Strategy, an executive education course Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution, and serves on the Masters of Business Analytics committee.

Sull has authored over 6 books and 100 articles including ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles. His books include Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them (2003), Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in a Uncertain World(2005) and Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (2015). His 2003 book Success Against the Odds: What Brazilian Champions Teach Us about Thriving in Unpredictable Markets was short-listed for Prêmio Jabuti award.

At Sloan, he developed the Culture 500 in partnership with Glassdoor and the MIT Sloan Management Review. He is also a co-founder of CultureX and a strategic advisor to E.J. McKay and Afterburner.

In 2008, The Economist called him "a rising star in a new generation of management gurus," and identified his theory of active inertia as one of the most impactful ideas in business management of the past century. The same year Fortune listed him as one of the top management gurus to know.

Education
Sull received his AB in Government from Harvard University in 1985. Subsequently he worked as a Business Analyst for two years at McKinsey and Company and for two years as the Director of Corporate Strategy, Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Company at Clayton Dubilier & Rice before returning to Harvard for an MBA. In 1992, Sull completed his MBA as a Baker Scholar.

Sull received his Doctorate in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School in 1996. His dissertation Organizational Inertia and Adaptation in a Declining Market: A Study of the US Tire Industry won the George S. Dively Award for outstanding dissertation. The key findings were published as The Dynamics of Standing Still: Firestone Tire & Rubber and the Radial Revolution and won the Newcomon Award for the most outstanding article published in the Business History Review in 1999. As a doctoral student, Sull and his wife were resident tutors in Winthrop House.

Career
After completing his Doctorate from Harvard, Sull moved to London and joined the London Business School as an Assistant Professor, returning to the US to teach at Harvard Business School in 2000. In 2004, Sull returned to London and taught at the London Business School until 2013. He was Faculty Director of Executive Education at London Business School from 2008 to 2011.

In 2013, Sull came to the US and started teaching at MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2016, he co-founded the MIT Sloan X-Lab and served as it's co-director for two years.

Sull has been a strategic advisor to Afterburner since 2014 and to E.J. McKay & Co. since 2017. From 2014 to 2017, he served as a strategic advisor to Bill and Medline Gates Foundation. Since 2014, he has been the chairman of Film-Fish, which combines human curation with machine learning and NLP algorithms to provide over 1 million high quality recommendations for movies, TV shows, and documentaries. He leads the MIT Sloan Management Review Strategic Agility Project, a series of articles, interactives, interviews, and webinars that provide evidence-based practical advice on how leaders can execute their strategies effectively in volatile markets. In 2018, he co-founded Charles Thames, a company that develops machine learning algorithms and evidence-based tools to help firms execute their strategy, and continues to serve as its CEO.

Active Inertia
Horn is most known for putting forth the concept of organizational 'active inertia'. According to the concept, at times executives get stuck in using old solutions for new problems, which leads to the downfall of the organization. His research has also focused on how organization and business leaders can effectively respond to changes in competitive environment. His first work in this area of his doctorate thesis entitled Organizational Inertia and Adaptation in a Declining Market: A Study of the US Tire Industry that he completed in 1995. Later he elaborated his ideas in the 1997 paperManagerial Commitments and Technological Change in the U.S. Tire Industry. His work explored the reasons of how a firm's commitments harden over time and lock companies into inertia.

In his book Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them, Sull discussed in greater detail on how organizations fall in the trap of active inertia and what they can do to avoid it.

Strategic agility
In 2005, Sull's research began focusing on the topic of strategic agility. His 2005 paper Strategy as Active Waiting discussed the concept of "active waiting." Sull conducted research over a period of six years during which he monitored 20 pairs of comparable companies in, what he calls unpredictable industries. He found that more successful company in every pair responded to volatile factors such as changes in regulation, technology and macroeconomics. He gave such strategy the term active waiting, "the act of anticipating and preparing for opportunities and threats that executives cannot fully predict."

Sull has also written at length on how organizations can thrive in rapidly changing environments, which includes his 2005 book The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in An Uncertain World. He also leads the MIT Sloan Management Review Strategic Agility Project, a series of articles, interactives, interviews, and webinars that provide evidence-based practical advice on how leaders can execute their strategies effectively in volatile markets.

Strategic agility in emerging markets
In the early 2000s, Sull has also conducted considerable research on successful organizations in emerging countries of the world. In this area, he has written two books, Made in China profiling successful Chinese Entrepreneurs and Success Against the Odds studying Brazilian organizations that have survived despite of turbulent times. Moreover, he wrote several articles exploring the strategies of successful companies in China and Latin America.

Tools to achieve strategic agility
Along with his research on successful companies, Sull have written significantly about how companies can make better decisions and be more agile. He co-authored the 2015 book, Simple Rules, which explains how organizations can effective solve problems using a simple set of rules.

Sull has also developed the concept of iterative processes, which organizations can use to make their strategies using a loop of processes. In 2005, in a paper he co-authored with Charles Spinoza, he presented the concept of a promise-based management, which is a view of an organization as a network of promises people make to get things done. He has also written about dynamic resource allocation and strategic priorities within organizations.

In 2018, he presented the concept of FAST goals in a paper he co-authored with Charles Sull. FAST goals as opposed to SMART goals, stands for Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Smart and Transparent.

Books
Sull is the author of three books and the co-author of three others. He co-authored his first book entitled Strategic Transformation through Quality in 1998. His third book, Success Against the Odds: What Brazilian Champions Teach Us about Thriving in Unpredictable Markets was short-listed for Prêmio Jabuti award.

Revival of the Fittest
Sull's second book Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them was published in 2003. In the book, he explains why successful companies fail. He also suggests a model for implementing change that can increase an organization's lifespan. According to him, the company leaders pave the path to a company's failure when the make a set of commitments to strategies, customers or some manufacturing method, and thus respond to problems in the future by solutions that worked in the past.

The book was translated into nine languages and selected as a finalist for Academy of Management Terry award for outstanding book on management. Globe and Mail wrote that "...the book is in fact very practical, with lots of examples and a series of steps for remaking your company's success formula when required, allowing for revival of the fittest, as the title suggests."

Made in China
In 2005, Sull co-authored Made In China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs in which he profiled eight Chinese Entrepreneurs studying the reasons behind their success. The book has been translated into eight languages. In a positive review about the book, Barron's called it "a book from which even veterans of the Chinese market can draw useful lessons."

Upside of Turbulence
In the 2005 book, Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in a Uncertain World, Sull explained that in order to succeed a rapidly changing business environment, companies much have two attributes: resilience to handle negative impacts of uncertainty and agility to respond to opportunities or threats. He explained in the detail the factors that influence both of the attributes at a company. In a mixed review about the book, Publishers Weekly wrote "with success stories from such companies as Microsoft and Carnival Cruise Lines, much of the information within is sound, but the lofty tone might make this a tough sell in an already shell-shocked marketplace." 800 CEO positively reviewed the book writing "Based on a decade of research, historical case studies, and intensive work with established enterprises and start-ups, this book lays out the fundamental logic of opportunity and provides a series of practical steps to translate insight into action.

Simple Rules
Sull's fifth book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World was co-authored with Kathleen Eisenhardt and published in 2015. In the book, they suggest that a limited set of simple rules must be applied to solve specific problems in complex situations. They emphasize that "short cut strategies" are the best way for businesses to solve problems. Sull first introduced the concept of simple rules in an article that he co-authored with Eisenhardt in 2002.

The book was translated into eight languages and named a top leadership book by the Washington Post, a top entrepreneurship book by Inc., a Wall Street must-read by Business Week, and “the nerd book of the summer” by Bloomberg TV.

Awards and honors

 * 1992 - George F. Baker Scholar, Harvard Business School
 * 1995 - George S. Dively Award for outstanding dissertation, Harvard Business School
 * 1999 - Newcomen Award for best article published in Business History Review
 * 2003 - David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Research Grant
 * 2008 - Identified by Fortune as one of the ten new management gurus to know
 * 2016 - Wharton Reimagine Education Award for Hybrid Learning

Personal life
Sull and his wife Theresa have four children, and split their time between Cambridge and Cape Cod. Sull is a Ohio State Buckeyes fan.

Books

 * Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (2015)
 * The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing opportunity in an uncertain world.  (2009)
 * Made in China: What Western managers can learn from trailblazing Chinese entrepreneurs. 2005
 * Success against the Odds: What Brazilian champions teach us about thriving in unpredictable markets. (2005)
 * Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them. (2003)
 * Strategic Transformation through Quality (1998)

Book Chapters

 * Two tales of one city: Samsung, Daewoo, and lessons on large-scale transformation,” in Rebecca Henderson et al. (editors), Leading Sustainable Change, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). (2015)
 * “Emirates Airline: The Hub of the World,” in T.C. Lawton (Ed.), Strategic 			Management in Aviation, (London: Ashgate). (2008)
 * “From lines to loops: An iterative approach to strategy,” in Robert Galavan et al. (eds.), Strategy, Innovation, and Change, (Oxford:  Oxford University Press).  (2007)
 * “No Exit: The Failure of Bottom-up Strategic Processes and the Role of Top-down Disinvestment.” J. L. Bower and C. Gilbert (eds.), From Resource Allocation to Strategy. (New York: Oxford University Press):  135-175. (2005)
 * “When the Bottom-up Resource Allocation Process Fails” J. Bower and C. Gilbert (eds.), From Resource Allocation to Strategy. (New York: OUP): 93-98. (2005)

Articles

 * KM Eisenhardt, DN Sull: Strategy as simple rules. Harvard business review 79 (1), 106-119, 2001.
 * MT Hansen, HW Chesbrough, N Nohria, DN Sull: Networked incubators. Harvard business review 78 (5), 74-84, 2000.
 * DN Sull: Why good companies go bad. Financial Times 3,	2005.
 * D Sull, S Turconi: Fast fashion lessons. Business Strategy Review 19 (2), 4-11, 2008.
 * DN Sull: The dynamics of standing still: Firestone Tire & Rubber and the radial revolution. Business History Review 73 (3), 430-464, 1999.
 * D Sull: How to thrive in turbulent markets. Harvard Business Review, 2009.
 * DN Sull, RS Tedlow, RS Rosenbloom: Managerial commitments and technological change in the US tire industry. Industrial and corporate change 6 (2), 461-500, 1997.