About the Author

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Edmondson joined the Business School faculty in 1996 and has taught courses in leadership, organizational learning, and operations management in the MBA and Executive Education programs. Her writings on organizational learning and leadership have been published in more than sixty articles in academic and management journals, and she has consulted widely on these topics for organizations around the world. In 2003, the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior division selected Edmondson for the Cummings Award for outstanding achievement, and in 2000, it selected her article “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams” for its annual award for the best published paper in the field. Her article with Anita Tucker, “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change,” received the 2004 Accenture Award for significant contribution to management practice.

Before her academic career, she was director of research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked with founder and CEO Larry Wilson to design and implement change programs in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as chief engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Boston: Birkhauser, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a nontechnical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University. She lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband, George Daley, and their two sons.