Gregory Hennessy

I am earning my doctoral degree in Positive Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University (CGU), where I study strategic leadership and the impact of moral purpose on organizational performance. I have been interested in questions of purpose and meaning in life and in work since college. But for many years I considered them too impractical to focus on. A few years ago a trusted college told me about the program at CGU featuring Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (co-founder of positive psychology, author of "Flow"), and I immediately began to see the opportunity to try to answer some of these questions. I left a good-paying job to start down a new path. I hope to use my two decades of experience in the "real world" to address some of these long-simmering questions. I have been a strategy and organizational development consultant for more than 20 years integrating knowledge of human and organizational behavior, complexity and systems thinking, and quantitative analysis to help clients solve their most difficult problems. I have been an Engagement Manager and Manager of Professional Development at McKinsey & Co. I have served on the faculty of the Shell Learning Center and was a consultant to Shell’s Learning & Transformation Services group. I hold Master’s degrees in Social Science from the California Institute of Technology and in Management from MIT’s Sloan School.

October 2015