D. Christopher Kayes The George Washington University, USA
Dr. Chris Kayes (PhD, Case Western Reserve University) is Professor of Management at The George Washington University School of Business where he has taught for over 20 years. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership at The George Washington University and has served as a fellow at Harvard’s Learning and Innovation Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is author or coauthor of four books: Contemporary Organizational Behavior (Pearson), Organizational Resilience: How Learning Sustains Organizations Through Crisis, Disaster, and Breakdown (Oxford University Press), The Learning Advantage: Six Practices of Learning-Directed Leadership (Macmillan), and Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mt. Everest Disaster (Macmillan). Dr. Kayes’ research on learning, leadership, and resilience has appeared in over 50 publications. His paper, ‘The destructive pursuit of idealized goals’ received the first most significant contribution to the practice of management award by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. His analysis of the 1996 Mt. Everest climbing disaster won a best paper award from the journal Human Relations, and his extension of experiential learning theory was nominated for the first best paper award in the Academy of Management Learning and Education journal. Focusing on the role that experience plays when learning in the face of complex and novel situations, he has studied how learning, leadership, and teamwork play a role in resilience, especially in light of crisis, disaster, and organizational breakdown. He served three terms as Chair of the Management Department and as Interim Dean of the School of Business. He oversaw the introduction of new Masters programs in Human Resource Management and Sport Management, and a new University wide interdisciplinary Undergraduate minor in Entrepreneurship as well as several certificates. He has consulted for a variety of Universities, not for profits, and companies around the world.
