Headshot of Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She recently launched a second year elective, Crafting Your Life: The First 10 Years Post MBA. This course encourages students to be more intentional about their choices, and provides guidance to help them in terms of managing their careers, relationships, and lives. Beyond this course she has become involved in building and studying the HBS alumni community.  She leads the LIFE Special Project that seeks to create ways to simultaneously help individuals learn about themselves and their choices and tradeoffs in life while also enabling more general knowledge creation about what it means to live a good life.

Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the micro-dynamics of work and life. She has long studied how individuals act within an organization – i.e., what do people do all day, how do they spend their time, with whom do they interact– and the consequences for organizations and individuals. She documents individuals’ work practices including the use of technology, meetings, virtual interactions, and managing across cultures with global teams, and explores the implications of these practices for organization productivity, individuals’ careers, and family lives. Professor Perlow has recently launched several projects to explore hybrid work and how individuals' work location relative to their co-workers as well as others in their lives (i.e., family, partners, roommates) effects their work productivity and their individual (and family's) well-being. She combines deep inductive qualitative research with data analytics to better understand and empower teams to improve the way they work.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Perlow was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Business School. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant.