Member - Tom Cummings

Dr. Thomas G. Cummings is a leading international scholar and consultant on designing and implementing high-performance organizations. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

Dr. Cummings is also a senior member of the renowned Center for Effective Organizations at USC, a world leader in applied knowledge of high-involvement organizations, team-based work, innovative reward systems, and large-scale change. Dr. Cummings received BS and MBA degrees from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Dr. Cummings' pioneering work in socio-technical systems led the way for many current applications of self-managed work teams in companies throughout the United States. His early work with Alcoa and Sherwin Williams was among the first union-management quality-of-work-life projects carried out in the U.S. These efforts showed that both sides of the bargaining table could cooperative to improve the organization.

During the past 30 years, Dr. Cummings has served as a senior consultant to numerous Fortune 100 companies in managing strategic change. Major projects have been conducted at Honeywell, Kimberly Clark, AFG Industries, Ethicon, General Mills, Rolls Royce, Parsons, American Healthways, Jack in the Box, Cymer, and General Dynamics. These efforts have resulted in new strategic directions and innovative organizations that emphasize self-managed teams, skill-based pay and gainsharing, flat hierarchies, employee empowerment, and creative selection methods. Dr. Cummings has also extended his work to Mexico where he has consulted to Vitro Corporation and Leiser Corporation to implement some of the first high-involvement organizations in Latin America.

Dr. Cummings has conducted numerous, in-house workshops and corporate retreats showing companies how to develop corporate strategies, how to design high-performing organizations, and how to devise change programs for implementing them. His clients include such firms such as Federal Express, Amoco, Mead Paper, Mobil Chemical, Armstrong World Industries, Pennsylvania Power and Light, Weyerhaeuser, Chase Lincoln First, TRW, and Health Net, which have praised him as being highly practical and informative. Many companies have used these retreats as a starting point to define new strategic directions and to design strategic changes necessary to enact them.

Dr. Cummings is widely recognized in both business and academic communities for his many contributions to knowledge about strategic change and high-performing organizations. He has authored over 60 articles and 19 books including the critically acclaimed: Self-Designing Organizations: Learning How to Create High Performance and Organization Development and Change, 8th Edition. Dr. Cummings is formerly President of the Western Academy of Management, Chair of the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Management Inquiry. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, President-Elect of the Academy of Management, and is listed in American Men and Women of Science and Who's Who in America.