Tamara J. Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and widely respected expert on organizations and the changing workforce – on the shifting relationship between individuals and corporations – and on enhancing innovation and workforce productivity. She is one of the 50 most influential living management thinkers in the world – named in the 2009 and 2011 Thinkers 50, a prestigious, biennial global ranking of business thinkers created by Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer and published in The (London) Times. Her work is based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration.
Recently, Tammy founded and is CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, www.tammyerickson.com, a firm of renowned thought-leaders and senior business leaders committed to developing insights into the challenges that today’s businesses are facing and offering a specific set of services that help companies re-shape their organizational practices.
She has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles: “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), winner of the McKinsey Award, “Managing Middlescence” (March 2006), “What It Means to Work Here,” (March 2007), and “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” (November 2007), as well as the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). She has also co-authored an MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams,” (Summer 2007). Tammy is the author of one of Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2008, “Task, Not Time,” (February 2008), one of HBR’s Forethoughts on Unconventional Wisdom in a Downturn, “‘Give Me the Ball’ Is the Wrong Call,” (December 2008), and the HBR Case Study “Gen Y in the Workforce” (February 2009).
Tammy recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today’s workplace. Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work were published by Harvard Business Press in 2008. What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want was published in 2010. Her blog “Across the Ages” is featured weekly on HBP Online (http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/erickson/).
The research initiatives she and colleagues have undertaken include Demography is De$tiny, exploring the implications of current demographic changes on human resource practices, The New Employee/Employer Equation, developing new and powerful approaches to increasing employee engagement through segmentation, and the Cooperative Advantage, done in collaboration with a team at London Business School, exploring the working practices of over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals, representing the most extensive academically-grounded study of industry-based team working ever conducted. Her current research is focused on the implications of social enterprise software on the way we work.
Tammy is also a respected authority on technology and its implications for business and coauthor of the book Third Generation R&D: Managing the Link to Corporate Strategy, a widely accepted guide to making technology investments and managing innovative organizations.
Tammy is a former member of the Board of Directors of PerkinElmer, Inc., a Fortune 500 company competing in advanced technology markets, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Allergan, Inc.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago and a MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration where she was the recipient of the James Thomas Chirurg Fellowship.