Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century

Thomas Malone is the Patrick McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He was also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.” In 2004 he summarized two decades of his groundbreaking research on how work can be organized in new ways to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology in the critically acclaimed book The Future oof Work (translated into six languages). He has published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters, and is also an inventor with 11 patents and the co-editor of three books: Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology (Psychology Press, 2001), Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2003), and Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook (MIT Press, 2003). In 2012, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. He was cofounder of three software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He speaks frequently for business audiences around the world and is often quoted in the media. Before joining MIT in 1983, he was a research scientist at the xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He has a BA in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University, an MS in Engineering- Economic Systems from Stanford University, and a PhD in Cognitive and Social Psychology from Stanford University.