James L. Heskett earned a PhD from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
[1] He has also been the senior associate dean for educational programs at the HBS.
[2] In this capacity, he helped reduce the workload for MBAs, on the assumption that they had previously been bombarded with too much information they could not take in.
In his 1992 book called Corporate Culture and Performance, co-authored with his HBS colleague John Kotter, Heskett studied 200 companies and concluded that adaptable corporate cultures led to higher financial returns.
[3] He is also a prolific case writer and also featured on the list of The Case Centre's all-time top authors list (covering 40 years) released in 2014.