Deborah M. Kolb is Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership (Emerita) and the founder of the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons College School of Management. From 1991 to 1994, she was executive director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. She is currently a senior fellow at the program, where she codirects Negotiations in the Workplace. Kolb is an adjunct professor at the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France.
Kolb is an authority on gender issues in negotiation and leadership. In addition to the many articles she has written on the topic, she has coauthored The Shadow Negotiation, named by Harvard Business Review as one of the ten best business books of 2000; Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas of Bargaining; and Her Place at the Table: A Women's Guide to Negotiating the Five Challenges of Leadership Success. In addition to her research, Kolb organizes and leads executive development programs for senior women and serves as a consultant to organizations interested in retaining and advancing their best women. In 2008, Kolb received the Outstanding Achievement Award for her contributions to women's leadership issues by the Equality Commission of the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Boston Bar Association, and the Massachusetts Women's Bar Association.
Kolb received her PhD from MIT's Sloan School of Management, where her dissertation won the Zannetos Prize for outstanding doctoral scholarship. She has a BA from Vassar College and an MBA from the University of Colorado.
Jessica L. Porter is a writer, researcher, and consultant with extensive experience advising organizations across sectors and across geogÂraphies to create change. As an architect of women's leadership development programs, she leverages academic research to produce a wide variety of learning solutions that advance women in organizations. In the United States, she works with Fortune 500 companies to design and deliver global programs for women. In Africa, she consults to nongovernmental organizations to create sustainable opportunities for women. In every arena, her work reflects her expertise in connecting research and practice with her knowledge of gender, diversity, and leadership development.
While a research project manager at Harvard Business School, she was the lead researcher for Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work, by Leslie Perlow. It documents the longitudinal study in which small interventions with project teams at the Boston Consulting Group evolved into a firmwide change initiative.
She has a BA from Clark University and an MBA from Simmons School of Management.