Allen S. Grossman

Allen Grossman was appointed a Harvard Business School Professor of Management Practice in July 2000. He joined the Business School faculty in July 1998, with a concurrent appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Outward Bound USA for 6 years before stepping down in 1997 to work on the challenges of creating high performing nonprofit organizations. His current research focuses on business engagement in public education, leadership and management of public school districts, and leading and governing high performing nonprofit organizations.

Mr. Grossman has authored or co-authored numerous cases, articles and three books including Managing School Districts for High Performance; High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact; and the  Harvard Business Review article, Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists.

In the MBA program, Mr. Grossman has taught, among other courses, Leading and Governing High Performing Nonprofit Organizations, Social Entrepreneurship, and Leadership and Corporate Accountability.  In executive education,  Mr. Grossman co-founded  the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint project of HBS and HGSE; he served as faculty co-chair of PELP until 2013.  He co-founded and co-chaired Performance Measurement and Management of Nonprofit Organizations (PMNO).  He has also taught  in numerous other executive education programs.  

Before joining the nonprofit sector, he served as a Regional Chief Executive of Albert Fisher PLC and Chairman of the Board of GPC, a national distributor of packaging products. Mr. Grossman serves on and has chaired a number of nonprofit and for-profit boards. He is currently the chair of Mercy Corps, an international development organization.  He received a B.S. in corporate finance from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.