IT Leadership Development Program

Accelerating Next Generation IT Leaders

The IT Leadership Development Program focuses on the specific skills, attributes and values required to be a successful IT leader. This intensive, modular, and individualized educational experience includes in-person workshops lead by world-class faculty, a personal assessment, frequent teleconferences, personal consultants, and access to high-quality, online, management development and performance support material.

Who Should Participate

Designed specifically for senior IT executives

Focused on the particular development needs of the leaders of IT organizations, including the direct reports of CIOs in large corporations and CIOs in smaller organizations.

Multiple attendees from single organizations reinforce learning across the IT management team.

About James I. Cash Jr., Ph.D.

Widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on IT leadership and the role of IT executives, Dr. Cash is the former James E. Robison Professor, Harvard Business School.He currently serves on the board of directors for several public companies: Microsoft, General Electric Company, The Chubb Corporation, Phase Forward Incorporated, and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., as well as several non-profit institutions.

Dr. Cash joined the Harvard Business School Faculty in 1976, and taught in all the major HBS programs: MBA, Program for Management Development (PMD), Program for Global Leadership (PGL), and Advanced Management Program (AMP). Among his administrative assignments he served as chairman of the MBA Program from 1992 to 1995 and as Senior Associate Dean and Chairman of HBS Publishing from 1998 to 2003. His research focused on the strategic use of information technology in the service sector.

In addition to the IT LDP, Dr. Cash is currently running an invitation-only program for chief information officers of leading companies - designed to promote peer-to-peer exchange and learning, and exposure to leading thinkers from business, government and academia - titled The Concours Executive Forum

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Today's IT Leadership Challenge

Executing an effective process for developing information technology leaders within the organization is required to realize value from your IT investment. Constant change, relentless pursuit of service quality and organizational innovation fuels the CIO to create long term growth for key leaders through education, learning, and collaboration.

Successful IT leadership requires competencies in three areas: professional, business, and personal.

Program Features

The IT LDP engages top academic and IT practitioners to provide a unique development experience for CIOs and their teams through an intensive, modular, blended-delivery program over the course of six months.

Program features include:

• A personal assessment of each participant's leadership strengths and weaknesses, using our CIO Competency Model. This assessment provides a basis for individual feedback and program planning, allowing us to highlight areas for specific focus during the program.
• A personal curriculum designed specifically to reach each participant with assignments chosen based on the results of the assessment
• Three workshops, each focused on specific knowledge, skills, attributes, and values required to be a successful IT leader.
• Teleconferences on topics of interest to participants.
• Regular contact with Dr. Cash and program staff
• Access to world class instructors
• Network of peers from other premier corporations
• Personal consultants matched to each participant to provide support and guidance on individual leadership plans.
• Assignments designed to reinforce the workshop learning and support the individual participant's development plan, with coaching support from senior consultants
• Access to high-quality, online, management development and performance support material offered by Harvard Business School Publishing.

• Click here for the IT LDP brochure

Program Leaders

The IT LDP's Executive Director is Dr. James I. Cash, Jr., one of the leading thinkers on the future role of the CIO and the use of information technology within corporations. He recently completed a 27-year career as a professor and Senior Associate Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and is currently a member of numerous corporate and non-profit boards.

Keri E. Pearlson, DBA is the program's Director. Dr. Pearlson is an expert in the area of managing and using information systems. Her textbook, Managing and Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach, is used by numerous graduate programs to train future IT leaders.

Laura Dalton is the program coordinator.

Featured Instructors

Linda Hill - the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Area at the Harvard Business School. She is the faculty chair of the Leadership Initiative. Her areas of expertise are managing change, managing cross-organizational relationships, globalization, career management, and leadership development.

Laura Alfaro - Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Her latest research has focused on the role local institutions play in attracting capital flows and allowing positive benefits of such flows, in particular foreign direct investment (FDI), to materialize.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee - Andreas Andresen Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at the Harvard Business School. His research examines how business strategies can be adapted to country-specific institutions. He is particularly interested in strategies that help companies deal with uncertain property rights.

Das Narayandas - James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is currently the Co-Chair of Harvard Business School Executive Education's Program for Leadership Development. Das's current research interests focus on business-to-business marketing and management of customer relationships.

Earl Sasser - Baker Foundation Professor and Co-Chair of the Program for Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School. Sasser developed the School's first course on the management of service operations in 1972. Professor Sasser has taught a variety of courses in the MBA program including Production and Operations Management, Decision Making and Ethical Values, The Operating Manager, and Service Management.

Rakesh Khurana - is an Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School. His research uses a social network perspective to re-frame classical economic and sociological explanations of market outcomes. His research focuses on the processes by which leaders are selected and developed.

Peter Weill - Dr. Weill is the Director of the Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at MIT and has developed and taught executive education and MBA programs on the business value of information. Peter regularly works with corporations and governments on issues of IT investment and pay off and aligning the IT portfolio to business strategy.