As of July 2008 Professor Emeritus of Management at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, Bill Torbert now broadly engages:

1) The ongoing transformation of leaders throughout adulthood. See, for example, David Rooke’s and my award-winning article in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review article “Seven Transformations of Leadership”; or explore www.harthill.co.uk and find the most thoroughly validated transformational leadership measure in the social scientific literature – the sentence completion form (SCT) that, if you fill it out and send it in as directed, provides you with a 25-page, personally-crafted Leadership Development Profile(LDP).  Harthill also provides 3-day intensive trainings for people interested in exploring their own next developmental transformation and in potentially using the LDP as an executive coaching tool.

2) The ongoing transformation of senior teams and whole organizations as they transform through growth, ‘going public,’ merger, or new vision (see, for example, my 2004 book with associates, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership, a Berrett-Koehler book available at www.bkconnection.com.

3) The ongoing transformation of the social sciences, from a supposedly neutral generalizable 3rd person descriptive study of the past…  to a 1st, 2nd, & 3rd person, increasingly participatory and timely action research on the present and the future as well (see, for example, such earlier books of mine as Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness1972, Creating Communities of Inquiry1976, Managing the Corporate Dream1987, and The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society and Scientific Inquiry1991; all now accessible, along with numerous articles at http://dcollections.bc.edu/william_torbert/

4) The ongoing transformation in the Third Age cohort (people in the third third of their lives) as we organize our personal family-and-friendship circles to support us in our approach to a good life, trusting in mutually transforming love, and helping one another face into our own transformation at death.  This action inquiry is being carried on primarily through by-invitation 3-day Alchemists’ Workparties.  

Previously, Torbert spent most of his childhood in Europe, going to Spanish, Austrian, and French schools, because his father was a Foreign Service Officer.  Bill graduated from Yale with a BA in Politics and Economics and a PhD in Administrative Sciences, served as Founder and Director of both the War on Poverty Yale Upward Bound Program and the Theatre of Inquiry, as well as successively on the faculties of Southern Methodist University, Harvard, and Boston College.  At BC he served as Carroll School’s Graduate Dean between 1978-87 (the school rising from below the top 100 to #25) and later as Director of the PhD Program in Organizational Transformation. He is one of the founding faculty of the Executive Program Leadership for Change at Boston College, and is a founding Research Member of the international Society for Organizational Learning. Within the academy, he has served as Chair for the Organization Development & Change Division of the Academy of Management and on the Board of the Organization Behavior Teaching Society, as well having served on the founding Editorial Boards of numerous journals including most recently the Journal of Action Research and Academy of Management Learning and Education.

Torbert has also consulted widely (e.g. Odebrecht Construction [Brazil], Volvo and UBS Warburg [England], Lego, Gillette, Bellcore, Citizens Energy, the US Army, the National Security Agency, the Center for Creative Leadership) and served on the Boards of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and P.B.Svigals & Associates (architects), as well as Trillium Asset Management (the first and largest independent social investing advisor). He currently focuses his consulting contributions through his role as Director of Research and Senior Consultant at HarthillUK.

If you are engaged by the ideas presented in this site and in the articles and books referenced, they can be made more intensively and extensively available to you and your organization in many ways – through the different links on this site, or by contacting Bill’s executive associate.