ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Allan R. Cohen, MBA with distinction and DBA from Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, has been at Babson since 1982. Professor Cohen holds the Edward A. Madden Distinguished Professorship in Global Leadership and is in residence at the San Francisco campus. He completed seven years as vice president of academic affairs and dean of faculty and recently served two years as the interim dean of the graduate school. He was awarded the college’s highest honor, The Walter Carpenter Prize for distinguished service.
His career has been devoted to increasing the leadership and management skills of practicing and aspiring managers and to building innovative academic organizations. A consultant on organizational change and leadership for companies as large as GE, IBM, and Lafarge, and as entrepreneurial as Access Technology and Menon and Menon Diesel Engines, he helped found the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He has also lived and worked in the Philippines, England, and Holland and has consulted in China, Brazil, Venezuela, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Singapore, and Dubai. At the University of New Hampshire, he was the J. R. Carter Professor of Management and helped build the Whittemore School of Business and Economics. Throughout his career he has directed and taught in executive development programs for thousands of managers.
Dr. Cohen’s first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, was Tradition, Change and Conflict in Indian Family Business, published by Mouton in The Hague. He is the coauthor with David Bradford of numerous books widely used by managers: the best seller Managing for Excellence; the award-winning Alternative Work Arrangements; Power Up: Transforming Organizations through Shared Leadership; Influence without Authority; and Influencing Up. He edited The Portable MBA in Management. And his coauthored best-selling text book with Fink, Gadon, and Willits, Effective Behavior in Organizations, through its seven editions helped transform the teaching of organizational behavior.
Areas of expertise include leadership and influence, changes in organizations, educational methods, management and organizational behavior, cross-functional teams, family business, management development for international work, negotiations, corporate entrepreneurship, and strategic change. He has served on the boards of several nonprofits, including First Place for Youth, Vinfen, Families for Depression Awareness, and the Cambridge School of Weston.
See web page: www.influencewithoutauthority.com
Pramodita (Dita) Sharma, PhD (University of Calgary), is the Daniel Clark Sanders Chair and professor of Family Business at the Grossman School of Business, University of Vermont. She is a visiting professor at the Kellogg School of Management’s Center for Family Enterprises, Northwestern University. She has also been a visiting scholar at Babson College where she served as the academic director of the Global Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practices (STEP) project for five years. Dita holds honorary doctorates from the Jönköping University in Sweden and the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany.
Dr. Sharma’s research on succession processes, governance, innovation, next-generation commitment, and entrepreneurial leadership in family enterprises has been honored with several international awards. She is amongst the most frequently cited scholars in family business studies. In addition to nine coauthored books, she has published over fifty scholarly articles and book chapters on family business studies. Her book on entrepreneurial family firms (with Hoy) is being used in family business courses around the world and has been translated into Mandarin. And the SAGE Handbook of Family Business (with Melin and Nordqvist) is described as a “must read” and “critical resource for all students and scholars of family business.”
Sharma is active in leadership and advisory roles in a number of professional associations. She serves as the editor of Family Business Review, a highly ranked journal of business. With Mark Green, she co-founded Family Enterprise Research Conference in 2005. This annual conference attracts leading family business scholars from around the world. In 2013 she launched the Global Family Enterprise Case Competition.
Pramodita received the prestigious Barbara Hollander award at the twenty-fifth anniversary conference of the Family Firm Institute and received the Life Time Influence and Impact award at the 2015 Family Enterprise Research Conference.
Sharma maintains close links with the business community. Supported by various private and government agencies, her research is well received both in academic and practitioner outlets. She is a frequent speaker at gatherings of family business leaders around the world. This interaction enables her to share insights from evidence based research with practitioners while ensuring that her research remains focused on issues of significant importance to the family business community. Experiences and close interactions with her own family’s enterprises help keep her professional work rooted into the realties and complex dynamics of these fascinating enterprises that dominate the economic and societal landscape around the world.