Please note that faculty are subject to change and not all faculty teach in each session of the program.

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  Roberto Fernandez

  William F. Pounds Professor in Management
  Professor of Organization Studies
  

  Roberto M. Fernandez is an organizational sociologist who currently serves as the head of MIT Sloan’s Behavioral and Policy Sciences area, and as co-director of its Ph.D. program in Economic Sociology. His executive teaching duties include the management of innovation, change, and human resources; negotiations; networks; and power and politics in organizations... ... (more)

  Roberto M. Fernandez is an organizational sociologist who currently serves as the head of MIT Sloan’s Behavioral and Policy Sciences area, and as co-director of its Ph.D. program in Economic Sociology. His executive teaching duties include the management of innovation, change, and human resources; negotiations; networks; and power and politics in organizations. In addition, Fernandez is the chief professor in charge of MIT Sloan’s required MBA course on Organizational Processes. He has traveled extensively, lecturing in Abu Dhabi, Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Iceland, Singapore, and South Africa.

  Fernandez has extensive experience doing field research in organizations, including an exhaustive five-year case study of a plant retooling and relocation. He is continuing his research on networks and hiring by studying financial services, market research, manufacturing, and retail sales jobs. His current research focuses on the organizational processes surrounding the hiring of new talent using data collected in 14 organizations.

  Before joining MIT in 2000, Fernandez was a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business from 1994 to 2000, serving as the area coordinator in charge of the school’s organizational behavior faculty. Prior to Stanford, he was associate professor of sociology and urban affairs at Northwestern University from 1989 to 1994. His first academic job was as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Arizona from 1984 to 1989.

  Fernandez is the author of over 40 articles and research papers published in the top academic journals in his field. A noted expert in organizational sociology, he is the recipient of numerous academic honors and awards.

  He holds a BA in sociology magna cum laude from Harvard University, and both an MA and a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. (less)

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  Steve Spear

  Senior Lecturer
  

  Spear is a well-recognized expert on how select organizations manage complex development, design, and delivery efforts to create unmatched rates of internally generated, broad based improvement and innovation. Resulting leadership on reliability, agility, cost, quality, safety, and so forth produces sustainable competitive advantage even in the face of intense rivalry... ... (more)

  Spear is a well-recognized expert on how select organizations manage complex development, design, and delivery efforts to create unmatched rates of internally generated, broad based improvement and innovation. Resulting leadership on reliability, agility, cost, quality, safety, and so forth produces sustainable competitive advantage even in the face of intense rivalry. Spear's book, The High Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition (McGraw Hill, 2010), has won several awards including the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research and the Philip Crosby Medal from the American Society for Quality.

  His articles, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” and “Learning to Lead at Toyota” have been widely read and have become part of the lean manufacturing canon. Spear's “Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today,” won a McKinsey Award as one of the best Harvard Business Review articles in 2005 and his fourth Shingo Prize for Research Excellence. He has published in Annals of Internal Medicine and other medical journals as well and has had op-ed pieces in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Fortune.com, and Industry Week. He has been interviewed on Bloomberg TV and radio and on CBS News and quoted in a number of magazines and newspapers and has spoken to audiences as diverse as the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the Institute of Medicine.

  As a consultant and advisor, Spear works actively with organizations to develop their capacity for high speed sustained improvement and innovation. He played an integral role in developing the Alcoa Business System, which has been credited with saving hundreds of millions of dollars in Alcoa's annual report, and the Perfecting Patient Care system of the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative, which helped raise quality and safety of care in area hospitals and which has been credited with saving many lives and much money. His clients include organizations such as Lockheed Martin, John Deere, Intel, Intuit, Brigham Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He consulted for the MacArthur Foundation, and works with Toyota on supplier development efforts. A senior lecturer, both in MIT's Sloan School of Management and also the Engineering Systems Division, Spear teaches a course about high velocity organizations in the Leaders for Global Operations Program and in several executive education programs. He supports the Institute for Healthcare Improvement efforts as a senior fellow.

  Spear’s academic degrees include a doctorate from Harvard Business School, masters degrees – in management and mechanical engineering – from MIT, and a bachelors degree in economics from Princeton. He worked for the investment bank Prudential-Bache, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and the University of Tokyo, and he taught at Harvard Business School for six years. He and his wife, Miriam, an architect, live in Brookline MA with their three children. (less)