Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior

Contact information:

Stanford University
Graduate School of Business
518 Memorial Way
Stanford, CA  94305-5015

Phone:  (650) 723-2915
Fax:  (650) 725-9932
Email: pfeffer_jeffrey@gsb.stanford.edu

Biography of

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ph.D.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1979.  He is the author or co-author of twelve books: 1) The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (translated in Japanese), 2) Organizational Design, 3) Power in Organizations, 4) Organizations and Organization Theory, 5) Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations (translated into German, Dutch, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese), 6) Competitive Advantage Through People: Unleashing the Power of the Work Force (translated into Portuguese, Korean, Indonesian, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish), 7) New Directions for Organization Theory:  Problems and Prospects (translated into Spanish), 8) The Human Equation:  Building Profits by Putting People First (translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese), 9) The Knowing-Doing Gap:  How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (translated into Japanese, German, and Polish), 10) Hidden Value:  How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People (translated into Dutch, Japanese, Korean), 11 Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, and 12) What Were They Thinking: Unconventional Wisdom About Management. He has also published more than 110 articles and book chapters. 

Dr. Pfeffer has served on the faculties of the business schools at the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley.  During the 1981-1982 academic year he was the Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and during 2006 he was a visiting Professor at the London Business School, Singapore Management University, and IESE in Barcelona.  He currently serves on the board of directors of 1) SonoSite, a publicly traded company that develops hand-carried ultrasound equipment and 2) Audible Magic, a start-up developing music and advertising recognition technology and copyright protection products.  Since, January, 2003, Pfeffer has written a monthly management column entitled “The Human Factor” for Business 2.0, a leading business magazine with a circulation of 600,000.

Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. in Administration and Management Science and his M.S. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie-Mellon University.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

From 1994-1996, Dr. Pfeffer served as Director of Executive Education, responsible for all of the Stanford business school's executive education activities.  He has taught executive seminars in 33 countries including Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, South Africa, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Mexico in addition to lecturing in management development programs and consulting for many companies, associations, and universities in the United States.

Dr. Pfeffer is a member and Fellow of the Academy of Management and a member of the Industrial Relations Research Association.  He has won the Richard D. Irwin award for Scholarly Contributions to Management as well as several awards for books and articles.