Susan Harris is a pioneer in bringing state-of-the-art leadership and organization development practices to architecture and engineering firms. That specialty has evolved over the last 19 of the 31 years in which she has managed and consulted in training, organization development, and service quality in both the private and public sectors. Her work with A/E firms is informed by her extensive experience in other industries--especially public education, banking, and electric power generation and distribution--and she continues occasionally to work outside A/E in order to stay abreast of innovations and opportunities for cross-fertilization.
Susan's consulting projects have focused on enabling organizations from 25 to 17,000 people to develop leadership and empower the workforce at all levels, to make strategic use of consensus-based teams, and to build a learning organization capable of responding resiliently to chaos and complexity. Strategic thinking and planning support, executive coaching and mentoring, teaming and communication development, and conflict resolution have been major components of this work for many years. Recently, in serving early adopter A/E firms, she has added focus on innovation and business model evolution.
On the education and training front, Susan co-designed a national, multi-year executive development program, the Senior Executives Institute, offered by the American Consulting Engineers Council in collaboration with the Advanced Management Institute for Architecture and Engineering (AMI) and the Brookings Institution. She was anchor faculty for the first four classes of executives, and continues to teach in the program. At AMI in San Francisco, she developed and taught the Leadership course for 7 years in addition to part of the Practice Management course, a course on Total Quality Management, and Facilitation for Project Leaders involved in projects of high complexity.
Culminating more than a decade of work in the A/E industry, she published Value Redesigned: New Models for Professional Practice (Greenway Communications: Ostberg Library of Design Management, 2005, 432 pages) with her colleague, Kyle V. Davy, AIA. Together, they guided and facilitated a 2-year collaborative research project that engaged 13 firms from around the U.S. as part of the basis for this seminal book.
Dr. Harris was an adjunct faculty member in JFK University's School of Management for many years and former Co-Editor-in-Chief of Vision/Action, the journal of the Bay Area Organization Development Network, where she also published numerous articles over a 10-year period. She holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in English Literature.