Deborah M. Kolb is Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership (Emerita) and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons School of Management. From 1991-1994, Kolb was Executive Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Program where she co-directs The Negotiations in the Workplace Project. During the 2011-12 academic year, Kolb will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor for Women and Leadership at Lokey School of Business at Mills College.
Professor Kolb is an authority on gender issues in negotiation, and leadership especially how women can negotiate the conditions for their own success at the same time as they contribute to the effectiveness of their organization. Kolb has co-authored several books on this subject. Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas of Bargaining (Jossey-Bass/John Wiley, 2003) shows women (and men) how they can become more effective in their everyday negotiations by attending to the dual requirements of the shadow negotiation – advocacy for oneself and connection with others. Originally titled, The Shadow Negotiation, Harvard Business Review named it one of the ten best business books of 2000 and it received the best book award from the International Association of Conflict Management at its meetings in Paris, 2001. Her most recent book Her Place at the Table: A Women’s Guide to Negotiating the Five Challenges of Leadership Success describes how successful women negotiate for what they need to be effective in leadership roles at all levels of an organization. She is currently working on a new book, entitled, Negotiating Work, which outlines a new approach to negotiation in the workplace that connects individual actions to organization change.
Kolb publishes extensively on these topics and regularly presents her work to national and international audiences. Among other firms, Kolb has recently done work with: BBN Technologies, Campbell Soup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutschebank; Deloitte and Touche; Eli Lilly; EMC, W.L. Gore, IBM, JP Morgan-Chase, MasterCard International, Nationalgrid; Phillips Medical, Pricewaterhouse/Coopers; Time, Inc., Textron, and Verizon. Non- profit organizations have included The Ford Foundation, The Consultative Group in International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), Girl Scouts, USA, The Society for Human Resource Management, Financial Executives International, Financial Women’s Association, the Mayo Clinic, Network of Executive Women, Women in Technology International, among many others.
She has authored over 100 articles on the subjects of gender, negotiation, conflict in organizations, and mediation. Kolb is on the editorial boards of the Negotiation Journal, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, Harvard Negotiation Newsletter, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
