Cynthia Montgomery

Cynthia A. Montgomery is the Timken Professor of Business Administration and immediate past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she’s taught for over twenty years. For six years she led the strategy track in the School’s highly regarded Owner, President, Manager Program (OPM), attended by top managers of mid-sized companies from around the globe.  Currently, she is a core faculty member in the School’s Advanced Management Program.

Prior to Harvard, Montgomery was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Michigan and at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  At Harvard, she received the Greenhill Award for her outstanding contributions to the School’s core MBA strategy course.

Montgomery has published extensively in the fields of strategy and economics. She is a top-selling Harvard Business Review author, and her work has appeared in nearly a dozen top-tier academic journals and managerial outlets, including Financial Times, Management Science, American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Strategic Management Journal,Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Business, and others.   “Putting Leadership Back into Strategy” (published in Harvard Business Review) was where Montgomery initially presented some of the ideas for her later book, The Strategist.   She is the co-author ofCorporate Strategy:  Resources and the Scope of the Firm (with David J. Collis), and the editor of Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm.  

Montgomery has served on the Board of Directors of two Fortune 500 companies, several non-profit organizations,  and a number of mutual funds managed by BlackRock, Inc.