David J. Collis is a globally recognized authority on corporate strategy, competitive strategy, industry analysis, and global competition. He is an Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Over 35 years at Harvard, he has developed and taught MBA and executive education programs in corporate and international strategy and has been recognized as one of the school’s leading strategy educators.
Collis previously taught at Yale School of Management and Columbia Business School. He received the Outstanding Educator Award from the Academy of Management’s Strategy Division and won the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article for “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?”, co-authored with Michael Rukstad.
He is the author of more than 40 articles and book chapters and of books including Corporate Strategy and Corporate Headquarters. His research addresses one of the most consequential questions facing senior executives: how companies create and sustain competitive advantage and, particularly in multibusiness organizations, how the corporate center can add genuine value to individual businesses. His 2024 HBR article with Bharat Anand examines why multibusiness strategies fail and how companies can align their portfolios, structures, and management processes around specific sources of value creation.
Beyond academia, Collis has advised the senior management of major corporations including Merck, Maersk, Fidelity Investments, and MetLife. He holds an MBA and Ph.D. from Harvard University and an MA from Cambridge University.
Why Book David J. Collis?
David Collis brings something particularly valuable to senior leadership audiences: the intellectual rigor of Harvard strategy thinking combined with practical experience advising CEOs and executive teams. His sessions are especially powerful for organizations facing questions of portfolio strategy, diversification, transformation, governance, resource allocation, or the role of the corporate center.
Rather than offering generic management inspiration, Collis gives executives frameworks they can immediately apply to their own organization. He is particularly effective in customized executive sessions where he can study the company beforehand and use its real strategic challenges to turn the keynote into a high-level working conversation.
