Morten Hansen

Morten Hansen's most recent book is Great by Choice, co-authored with Jim Collins. You can visit Morten's webpage for more information on this and his other book "Collaboration," www.mortenhansen.com.  

Prior to joining the I School, Morten T. Hansen was professor at Harvard Business School and at INSEAD, France, where he retains a part-time role. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  His award-winning research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, among others. He speaks and consults for large companies throughout the world.

What is the best thing about working at the I School?
It's a truly cross-disciplinary place, where people get together to study the phenomenon of information. I believe strongly that academia needs to be more collaborative in order to solve big problems and advance knowledge, and the I School is well placed to do that.

What information issues interest you most?
Collaboration in and across companies. This also includes online collaboration tools in business.

Your current research focuses on business administration and management. What do you see as the greatest management challenges in the information arena?
I am a management scholar who happens to have a strong interest in information. The hallmark of today’s management is decentralization, which also means that information is widely dispersed. The key challenge is to assimilate disparate pieces of information so that work can be done better.

In your class "Managing Information-Intensive Companies", you discuss management principles for the Information Economy. Can you give us one example of an management skill that is too-often overlooked?
Collaboration. We know a lot about managing in a hierarchy, but we know much less about how to manage across many parts.