Axiom Awards
Winner of the 2024 Axiom Business Book Award Gold Medal in the Emerging Trends/AI category for The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI (Harvard Business Review Press)
Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Research Strategy, and Faculty Chair of the Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Business School. Recognized as one of the Forbes Future of Work 50, and one of the 100 people transforming business who are innovating, sparking trends, and tackling global challenges by Business Insider, her work focuses on how leaders can scale their organizations by developing and implementing global and digital strategies. She regularly advises top leaders who are embarking on virtual work and large scale-change that involves global expansion, digital transformation, and becoming more agile.
She is the author of three award-winning books at the intersection of work, technology and transformation. The book she co-authored, The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the age of Data, Algorithms and AI, which introduces the “30% rule,” the minimum threshold that gives us just enough digital literacy to understand and take advantage of the digital threads woven into the fabric of our world. Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, provides remote and hybrid best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations chronicles the behind-the-scenes radical transformation process of a globalizing company over the course of five years.
She has also published extensively in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of International Business, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review, and her work has been widely covered in media outlets such as BBC, CNN, Financial Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. Her HBS case, Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, is one of the most used cases worldwide on the subject of virtual work.
Tsedal has popular online courses including Remote Work Revolution for Everyone and Leading in a Remote Environment (with Ronald Heifetz). She has previously been the course head for the first-year required Leadership and Organizational Behavior course in the MBA program that focuses on how to lead effectively; the curriculum addresses group behavior and performance, organization design, change and how to align people behind a common vision.
Prior to her academic career, Tsedal spent ten years working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various roles, including strategies for global customer experience, 360- degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. A sought-after speaker with extensive international experience, she is fluent in four languages. She holds a patent for her software simulation on global collaboration.
Tsedal is a recipient of the prestigious Charles M. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching in Executive Education and the Greenhill Award for outstanding contributions to Harvard Business School (two-time recipient). She serves on the Board of Directors of Brightcove, Rakuten Group, Inc., Brown Capital Management, and the Partnership Inc.
Tsedal received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, specializing in Work, Technology and Organizations. Tsedal was named as one of the Top Management Thinkers in the World by Thinkers50, honored as a Stanford Distinguished Alumnus Scholar and was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research.
You’ve been a terrific source of insights and perspective on our Englishnization program at Rakuten. I’m sure your guidance and research would be of enormous value to any company’s globalization efforts.
Awards & Honors
Cases & Teaching Materials
Neeley, Tsedal. “Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO.” Harvard Business School Teaching Note 421-058, January 2021. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal. “Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO.” Harvard Business School Teaching Note 421-058, January 2021. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal. “Six Simple Steps to Action Planning.” Harvard Business School Background Note 421-033, August 2020. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, and Briana Richardson. “Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (B).” Harvard Business School Supplement 420-073, June 2020. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, and John Masko. “Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A).” Harvard Business School Case 420-071, June 2020. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, Paul Leonardi, and Michael Norris. “Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (B).” Harvard Business School Supplement 419-088, June 2019. (Revised February 2020.) View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, Paul Leonardi, and Michael Norris. “Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (A).” Harvard Business School Case 419-066, June 2019. (Revised February 2020.) View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, and Julia Kelley. “The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with ‘International Values and Local Roots’ (A) and (B).” Harvard Business School Teaching Note 419-063, June 2019. View Details
Neeley, Tsedal, and JT Keller. “From Globalization to Dual Digital Transformation: CEO Thierry Breton Leading Atos Into ‘Digital Shockwaves’ (B).” Harvard Business School Supplement 419-046, April 2019. View Details
This online simulation teaches students about the difficulties in cross-cultural communication and managing global teams. Communicating via chat, teams of 4 or 5 students race against the clock to prepare a VC presentation. Students are assigned the role of a native English speaker or a nonnative English speaker at their organization. The simulation constrains the ways in which the native and nonnative speakers can interact, and the resulting experience replicates communication patterns in real globally diverse and distributed teams. As their team struggles to collaborate, students experience first-hand how communication challenges can interfere with work goals.
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