Writing
I write about what Italy teaches us about power, leadership, and living well at my Substack Professor Wears Prada. My daughter Maddy has a branding mind and helped me find the title. Thank you, M. It reflects my identity. A professor always, one who researches, observes, teaches, and shares, but one who is increasingly pulled with a magnetic force in the direction of all things Italy. Prada of course is my phrase for italianità. And of course, I identify with Miranda. That's all.
I'm a Northwestern University professor and leadership scholar. I’ve devoted my career to researching teams and leadership in fascinating places. Future NASA missions to Mars, or the Ancient Roman Empire. I study modern organizations, and my passion is helping leaders lead well.
My fuel is Italy. Early in my career it was the place I'd go to gain perspective, take in beauty, and write using the flowing wifi available at Italian beach clubs while my kids swam in the mare. Those kids are now adulting, and Italy continues to inspire and comfort me. Always there when I need her. Now to write and write. To chat and chat. To enjoy life, and still with that purpose of helping leaders lead well. And live well.
For the 2025/26 academic year I was on sabbatical based between Florence and Stanford, meeting wonderful people also on their journeys, as scholars, writers, practitioners, leaders, and more than a few asking the big question: what's next? We're all on this journey together, to find meaning. I've been writing about that on Substack, and working on the books I hope to share with you on this very page.
Why write?
"I write because, exacting as it may be to do so, it is still more difficult to refrain, and because, however conscious of one's limitations one may be, there is always at the back of one's mind an irrational hope that this next book will be different: it will be the rounded achievement, the complete fulfilment. It never has been: yet I am still writing." — Iris Origo, Images and Shadows
"I think," said my step-father, Percy Lubbock, when I once commented on the exquisitely neat and decorative pages of his manuscript, "I think, before I write." I do not, alas, resemble him." — Iris Origo, Images and Shadows
"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." — Joan Didion, Why I Write
In heaven, also known as the personal library of Iris Origo, at her La Foce estate in the Val d'Orcia. The book I'm holding is titled The Most Illustrious Women of the Italian Renaissance. To find this book on Iris's shelves fuels my determination to write about these illustrious women, of whom I consider her to be one. Designer of a vast estate with a social cause, humanitarian during the war, woman who left a roadmap to finding meaning in life and doing so with character and grace. She is without question my favorite Renaissance Woman.
I wonder if she had a vague sense when she last held this book, that I’d be here a half century later, in her library hanging on her every word.
Read my leadership perspective on Cosimo the Elder made visible through the art of Fra Angelico, featured in The Florentine
Read my latest research on shared leadership in Ancient Rome and NASA space teams Academy of Management Discoveries, with Alina Lungeanu, Megan Chan, & Noshir Contractor
“Any number of leaders can do, except when there’s two,” new insights for leaders featured in Academy of Management Insights