Biography
Dr. Donald Sull is a global expert on strategy execution. He is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches courses on Competitive Strategy and Strategy Execution and serves on the Master of Business Analytics Committee. He was formerly a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Harvard and the London Business School, winning teaching awards at both universities.
The Economist named him “a rising star in a new generation of management gurus,” and identified his theory of active inertia as an idea that shaped business management over the past century. Fortune listed him among the ten new management gurus. Sull has published five books and over 100 case studies and articles, including ten best-selling Harvard Business Review articles. His latest book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, was co-authored with Stanford Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt.
In partnership with the MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull and his co-authors are publishing a year-long series of evidence-based articles to help leaders execute strategy more effectively. The kick-off article-Turning Strategy into Results-describes the characteristics of an effective strategy for execution. Sull is the Founder and Managing Partner of Charles Thames, which harnesses cutting-edge analytics and evidence-based interventions to help organizations execute their strategy.
Sull is the Chairman of Film-Fish, which combines human curation with machine learning and NLP algorithms to provide over 1 million high quality recommendations for movies, TV shows, and documentaries. He is a strategic advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BetterWorks, E.J. McKay, and Afterburner.
Prior to academia, Sull worked as a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a management-investor with the leveraged buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He earned his bachelors, masters, and doctorate at Harvard University.