Rosabeth Moss Kanter

• Born: March 15, 1943
• Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio

Management consultant; writer; educator

“In a sense, the theme of all my work has been how we have to break down categories and boxes, and create better connections that allow people to move freely between the different parts of their lives,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter told Susan McHenry for Ms. magazine (Jan. 1985). “That's what I've always wanted personally, too, because I never felt I fit neatly into anybody's category; I cut across so many.” As a sociologist, professor, consultant, and writer, Kanter brings a fresh, multidisciplinary perspective to the study of organizations.

Education and Early Career

Born on March 15, 1943, in Cleveland, Ohio, Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the daughter of Nelson Nathan Moss, an attorney and small-business owner, and Helen Smolen, a teacher. After graduating from Cleveland Heights High School in 1960, Kanter attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she majored in sociology and minored in English literature. She spent her junior year (1962–63) at the University of Chicago before graduating magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in sociology. Kanter went on to earn her master's degree in 1965 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, specializing in social organization with a minor specialization in social psychology. Two years later she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, also on social organization, at the same institution and earned her PhD. While in graduate school, she also worked at the University of Michigan, first as a research assistant, then as a teaching fellow, and ultimately as an instructor in sociology.

Later Career

Kanter's first book, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (1972), combines the research she performed for her doctoral dissertation—on nineteenth-century utopian societies—with five years of intermittent communal living and further research. While teaching sociology as an assistant professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, from 1967 to 1973, she visited numerous communes and participated in several social experiments, among them Cumbres, a personal-growth community in New Hampshire; the Cambridge Institute's New City Project, whose goal was to design and build an urban-style commune—a “new city”—in rural Vermont (a goal that was never realized); and the NTL Institute in Bethel, Maine. Drawing on those experiences and on the results of a questionnaire completed by the members of twenty communes, she seeks in Commitment and Community to explain why certain communal and utopian experiments have either succeeded or failed. Viewing these living environments as large-scale social-science “laboratories,” Kanter writes in the book's preface that “the study of utopian communities in America can . . . contribute to the understanding of social life in general. Communal orders represent major social experiments in which new or radical theories of human behavior, motivation, and interpersonal relations are put to the test.”

Her examination of the organizational structure of communes inspired Kanter to produce several other works on the subject. She edited and contributed to Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life (1973); with Marcia Millman, she edited Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (1975), to which she also contributed; and her pamphlet Work and Family in the United States: A Critical Review and Agenda for Research and Policy was published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1977. Meanwhile, after taking a leave of absence from Brandeis in 1973–74 to teach at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education, Kanter returned to Brandeis in 1974 as an associate professor of sociology. Although she remained on the faculty of Brandeis until 1977, she was also associated with Harvard Law School, where she was a fellow in law and sociology in 1975–76 and a visiting scholar in the following academic year.

In her groundbreaking book Men and Women of the Corporation (1977), Kanter applies sociological research techniques to a detailed analysis of the corporate environment of a fictional midwestern company called the Industrial Supply Corporation, or Indsco. Examining all levels of the company—from secretarial and clerical up through management positions to the executive “power elite”—Kanter studies employees’ and managers’ behavioral patterns, which, as she writes in her introduction to the book, “can only be fully understood when there is adequate appreciation of the self-perpetuating cycles and inescapable dilemmas posed by the contingencies of social life.” She finds that the corporate structure's effect on the morale and performance of employees is often obscured by erroneous assumptions about gender roles in the workplace. “Findings about the ‘typical’ behavior of women in organizations that have been assumed to reflect either biologically based psychological attributes or characteristics developed through a long socialization to a ‘female sex role’ turn out to reflect very reasonable—and very universal—responses to current organizational situations,” she writes in the introduction. The book won the C. Wright Mills Award for the year's best book on social issues and is still regarded as a classic treatise on the subject.

“Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.”

In 1977 Kanter joined the faculty of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as a tenured associate professor of sociology. She was promoted to full professor of sociology and of organization and management in the following year. She remained at Yale until 1986, additionally teaching at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where she was a visiting professor of organizational psychology and management in 1979–80.

Also in 1977, Kanter founded the consulting firm Goodmeasure Inc. with Barry Stein, then a consultant with two decades of experience. In addition to teaching and writing, Kanter had begun consulting on the side around 1970. Goodmeasure came about partly as the result of the success of Men and Women of the Corporation, which enhanced her reputation as someone who was knowledgeable about the special opportunities and challenges presented to corporations by a rapidly changing labor force. The book also provided a focal point for her consulting skills.

Consulting was but one of the areas in which Kanter and Stein found fruitful collaboration possible. The two also coedited a compilation of essays entitled Life in Organizations: Workplaces As People Experience Them (1979) and cowrote A Tale of “O”: On Being Different in an Organization (1980). Filled with cartoonlike illustrations and humorous prose, A Tale of “O” (also available as a video) explores “the pressures of living as a token, the dilemma faced by the single O in a roomful of Xs,” as McHenry wrote. Lamenting the number of women who choose to leave the fast, or most direct, track to success within an organization to pursue their careers through alternate routes, Kanter told McHenry that it is often due to frustration that “many [women] go into their own entrepreneurial activities, or join consulting firms.” Moreover, she later noted that those who do move up in line jobs, as opposed to staff positions, could no longer count on being automatically promoted to the top levels. “It's a wonderful irony that, just as we get in, it doesn't mean anything,” Kanter said at a New Orleans gathering of the Academy of Management in 1987, as quoted by Sandra Salmans for the New York Times (17 Aug. 1987).

Having gradually shifted her perspective from that of an outsider to that of a high-profile adviser to CEOs, Kanter wrote The Change Masters: Innovations for Productivity in the American Corporation (1983), a highly acclaimed collection of case studies of some one hundred American corporations (including fifty that she had personally visited). After ranking the companies in terms of their “progressiveness” in corporate policies and management strategies, Kanter compares the financial performance of the most progressive companies with that of the least progressive corporations. She controls for size by comparing only those companies that fall within set ranges of net sales, assets, and number of employees. She concludes, in part, that the companies that were found to be the most “integrative”—that encourage employees to collaborate across organization boundaries—were more profitable than those deemed to operate in a “segmentalist” or “antichange” fashion—by compartmentalizing, for instance, information, people, problems, and solutions.

The Harvard Business School hired Kanter as a fully tenured professor of business administration in 1986. She and the school enjoyed a mutually advantageous relationship, in which each enhanced the other's visibility and reputation. Kanter's growing clout also afforded her greater access to the political realm. In 1986 she served as an adviser to Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who was gearing up for his second presidential campaign in the Democratic primaries. She also became closely associated with the eventual 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, whom she had met in 1985 during a tour of thirty of the state's most innovative companies. “We have compatible visions,” Kanter explained to Bruce Nussbaum for BusinessWeek (30 May 1988). “His attitude on how you get welfare recipients back to work is linked to his attitude about how you help ailing industries. You don't artificially support them. You give them a chance to revitalize with temporary import restrictions.”

Together, Kanter and Dukakis wrote Creating the Future: The Massachusetts Comeback and Its Promise for America, which was published in 1988 to coincide with Dukakis's campaign against the Republican nominee, then–vice president George H. W. Bush. For her next book, When Giants Learn to Dance (1989), Kanter studied more than eighty companies whose management styles ranged from the “corpocratic” sluggishness of multilayered bureaucracies to the “cowboy” mode pioneered by fast-growing newer ventures. She found that companies were becoming aware of the need for a managerial reaction to recent technological advances and the globalization of markets—a “post-entrepreneurial response,” as she labels it in her book, “that marries the entrepreneurial spirit to discipline and teamwork.” For workers, she coins the notion of “employability,” or the ability to acquire transferable skills and the flexibility required to advance one's career by moving from company to company rather than by moving up in a single firm. Reflecting the large increase in corporate mergers—and the resulting layoffs—that occurred during the late 1980s, When Giants Learn to Dance includes various tips and pointers to help companies strengthen the corporate bottom line while still achieving employee satisfaction and reducing employee burnout. Addressing the latter goal, Kanter suggests that managers and subordinates view work cyclically, with periods of intense productivity to be followed by stints of tackling the less stressful components of their jobs.

With a few exceptions, When Giants Learn to Dance was very well received by reviewers and by the business community. “Without minimizing the problems that arise in implementing post-entrepreneurial strategies,” Nancy Jackson wrote in the HBS Bulletin (Apr. 1989), “her book conveys a sense of hope that US companies are discovering a way to manage large organizations without heavy-handed command-and-control systems.” A review for Training & Development Journal (Nov. 1989) noted, “This book requires thought and deliberation on the part of the reader. Kanter has already done both. Without providing right or wrong answers, she asks tough-minded, perceptive questions about many of today's most critical issues.” The book earned Kanter the Johnson, Smith & Knisely Award for new perspectives on executive leadership.

In 1989 Kanter was appointed editor of the Harvard Business Review, a bimonthly scholarly journal founded in 1922 that was, at the time, in the process of broadening its audience to include more industry leaders and corporate decision makers. During her three years as editor, Kanter elaborated on the changes set in motion by her predecessor, Theodore Levitt, who tried to make the magazine more accessible. She added cover illustrations and longer article summaries, converted a book-review section into an idea review, and instituted a feature called Four Corners, which was dedicated to international business concerns, a field that Kanter had become more involved with in her own research. In 1991 the Harvard Business Review was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for general excellence.

Although subscription renewals to the Harvard Business Review increased under her leadership, Kanter was criticized by some disgruntled employees—in many cases, anonymously—for managing her editorial staff ineffectively, according to Joan Vennochi's 1993 article for Working Woman. Some employees complained that her speaking engagements and frequent traveling prevented her from being available and responsive to their concerns, while others said that several issues of the Review were perceived to have been delayed by an extensive reader survey Kanter commissioned on international business trends. Kanter's supporters have pointed out that many of the problems she encountered at the Review were the result of the pressures any faculty editor with outside demands would face in trying to expand the audience of the nation's most prestigious business journal. Others contended that sexism played a role in her difficulties and that her activities, policies, and decisions would probably be admired if she were a man. Under the terms of a reorganization in 1992, the Review brought in a full-time, professional editor—a move that some staff members, as well as Kanter herself, had been advocating long before Kanter's arrival—and Kanter became vice-chair of the newly created Harvard Business School Publishing Group.

With coauthors Barry Stein and Todd Jick, Kanter wrote The Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It and Leaders Guide It (1992), whose premise is that change within corporate organizations arises from three sources—the general business environment, the company's own aging and development, and individuals within the company competing for power—which in turn produce three forms of change: identity-related product-line expansion, a redesigned corporate hierarchy, and departmental reorganization. Accordingly, the authors argue that three managerial roles are called for to manage such changes: top-down strategic planning, middle-management implementation of new policies, and lower-level motivation tactics that give incentives to employees to be responsive to new corporate obligations. The book also incorporates essays from a number of other contributors.

Kanter's 1995 book World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy emphasizes the alternatives to the disorientation, job insecurity, and economic chaos that had been wrought by (among other factors) the increasing globalization of industry. Envisioning new opportunities and the revitalization of certain regions, she argues that local companies—and even entire cities—could benefit from globalization by becoming “world class” at thinking, manufacturing, or trading. She presents Boston, Massachusetts; Spartanburg-Greenville, South Carolina; and Miami, Florida, respectively, as successful exemplars of each skill. “This book is about how business leadership and community leadership can work together,” she writes in World Class, which found a far-flung audience overseas and in nonacademic fields. Although Stephen Baker argued in Business Week (16 Oct. 1995) that “it would have made for better reading had the author compared a winner and a loser city instead of just heaping praise upon her three cosmopolitans,” a reviewer for the Economist (9 Sept. 1995) concluded, “World Class is carefully researched and soberly argued.”

Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End was published in 2004. “Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute,” Kanter said to Claudia H. Deutsch for the New York Times (19 Sept. 2004). “It's the expectation of a positive outcome.”

America the Principled: 6 Opportunities for Becoming a Can-Do Nation Once Again, published in 2007, met with mixed reviews. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly (27 Aug. 2007) described the book as “scattered,” noting, “When the author supports her analysis with clear and substantial examples . . . she makes a compelling case. However, the book often moves from anecdote to generalization with thin supporting evidence.”

In January 2009, Harvard University debuted its Advanced Leadership Initiative, which Kanter conceived along with fellow Harvard professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, and for which she serves as chair and director. The initiative's website describes it as “a new third stage in higher education designed to prepare experienced leaders to take on new challenges in the social sector where they potentially can make an even greater societal impact than they did in their careers.” The same year, Kanter published Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good (2009), which Publishers Weekly (6 July 2009) called a “timely and captivating assessment of what it takes to succeed in the face of rapid technological, cultural and economic change.”

For Move: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead (2015), Kanter spent twenty months extensively researching transportation infrastructure in the United States as well as abroad. Based on this research, she argues in the book that “the main issue hindering American innovation in public transit is a stifling combination of corporate underinvestment and a lack of ‘faith in government.’ There is an urgent need to ‘allocate public money for public works at a national level’ and to empower leadership at the grass-roots level,” according to the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews (15 Mar. 2015). “Her accessible solutions encompass sophisticated, futuristic tools and incremental changes toward increasing efficiency while boosting public enthusiasm and cooperation.” The reviewer concluded by describing Move as “a busy yet passionately motivating call for action.”

In 2020, Kanter published Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. The work showcased real-life examples of business and community leaders whose innovative thinking successfully identified and solved problems that made life better for thousands.

The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975–76, Kanter holds numerous honorary doctoral degrees. She was named Woman of the Year by Ms. magazine in 1985 and has been inducted into the Working Woman Hall of Fame. The Boston College Center for Work and Family and the Center for Families at Purdue University jointly offer an annual Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for excellence in work-family research.

“[Kanter is] an entrepreneur in the best sense of the word—applying ideas to problems,” Robert B. Reich, the secretary of labor during the administration of President Bill Clinton, told Joan Vennochi for Working Woman (Feb. 1993). “She is a fount of insights into how the economy actually works, rather than how theoreticians say it works.”

Kanter married Stuart A. Kanter on June 15, 1963. He died in 1969. In 1972 she married Barry Stein, with whom she founded Goodmeasure five years later. They have one son.

Bibliography

"ALI’s Vision Is to Unleash the Potential of Experienced Leaders to Help Solve Society's Most Pressing Challenges." Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, www.advancedleadership.harvard.edu/vision-mission-history. Accessed 21 June 2024.

Deutsch, Claudia H. "If at First You Don't Succeed, Believe Harder." The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/business/yourmoney/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed-believe-harder.html. Accessed Accessed 21 June 2024.

Hindle, Tim. "Rosabeth Moss Kanter." Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus, Profile Books, 2008, pp. 257–58. Business Source Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=34933112&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. "Rosabeth Moss Kanter: The Professor as Business Leader." Ivey Business Journal, May–June 2002, pp. 57–63. Business Source Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=7191236&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.

McHenry, Susan. "Rosabeth Moss Kanter." Ms., Jan. 1985, pp. 62+.

Nussbaum, Bruce. "The Business Guru behind Dukakis." BusinessWeek, 30 May 1988, pp. 54–56.

"Publications." Harvard Business School, 2020, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=57518. Accessed Accessed 21 June 2024.

Salmans, Sandra. "Top Tiers Still Elude Corporate Women." The New York Times, 17 Aug. 1987, www.nytimes.com/1987/08/17/style/top-tiers-still-elude-corporate-women.html. Accessed Accessed 21 June 2024.

Vennochi, Joan. "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School." Working Woman, Feb. 1993, pp. 52–59.

Volpone, Sabrina D. "Kanter, Rosabeth Moss." Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia, edited by Vicki Smith, Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 485–87.