Welcome MIT Professor Deborah Ancona to the online MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp

We are excited to welcome MIT Professor Deborah Ancona as a featured speaker for the first time at the online MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp taking place this fall.?

MIT Bootcamps & Professor Ancona?

A leading expert in leadership and organization studies, Professor Ancona taught at MIT Bootcamp’s Venture Advancement Program, which took place May 8-12, 2023. During her session, she covered a myriad of leadership topics relevant to entrepreneurs, including developing their own leadership signatures as they grow their businesses and the power of leading teams effectively.?

“Entrepreneurs are usually too busy to think strategically about what kind of leaders they want to be. During the Venture Advancement Program, we wanted to help emerging and scaling entrepreneurs make a personal breakthrough in this area. Professor Ancona’s workshop was a great opportunity to learn about unique signatures of leaders like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and then immediately apply these learnings to themselves. At the end of the 1.5 hour session - after practicing and receiving feedback from their peers - they had a compelling story they could deliver to their customers, team, investors and other stakeholders.”

?- Hanna Adeyema, Director @ MIT Bootcamps?

Successful teams and distributed leadership

Professor Ancona has a number of roles at MIT enabling the development of innovative and influential leaders. She is the founder of the MIT Leadership Center, dedicated to helping students build the self-knowledge and collaborative capability necessary to make positive organizational and societal change. In addition, she is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and lead instructor for a number of MIT Executive Education courses, where she has impacted hundreds of executives and their teams.?

Beyond teaching, her pioneering research dives into how the most successful teams operate. Her book, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed, describes how these ‘X-teams’ can be “a vehicle for driving innovation within large organizations.” Her work also focuses on distributed leadership and how to enable organizations to nurture creative leadership at all levels.

She has served as a consultant for leadership and innovation for companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bose, Takeda, Li & Fung, OCP, Accenture, and ASA. Learn more about Professor Ancona.

Why Professor Ancona??

Over the course of 10 weeks at the Bootcamp, learners have the opportunity to be the CEO of their team for one week. During this time, they are expected to lead their team of peers – individuals from different backgrounds, countries, and cultures than themselves – through various parts of building a venture.?

Professor Ancona’s work will be a key component to the Bootcamp and will have immediate impact on the Bootcampers over the course of the program by enabling them to test and iterate their leadership skills in real time in a learning environment where they can make mistakes.

Applications to the MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp are open until September 10, 2023.