Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

Sonnenfeld's CEO Summits have drawn leaders from business, government, public policy, nonprofits, NGOs, and higher education. Past attendees have included Stephen Schwarzman, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Ray Dalio, Ashton Carter, Elaine Chao, Maurice Greenberg, Dina Powell, Robert Hormats, Carla Hills, Farooq Kathwari, John Bogle, John Whitehead, Albert Gordon, Jeffrey Bewkes, Randall Stephenson, David Shulkin, Wilbur Ross, Steven Mnuchin, Anthony Scaramucci, Peter Orszag, John Negroponte, Chris Shays, Indra Nooyi, Kevin Rudd, Steven Mnuchin, Ken Langone, David Solomon, Peter Navarro, Bob Woodward, Roland Betts, Peter Salovey, Danny Meyer, Brian Duperreault, Joanne Lipman, Jeff Zucker, Stefano Pessina, Dennis Muilenburg, Alex Gorsky, David Abney, Robert Lighthizer, Jared Kushner and many other influential leaders from across sectors. In December 2019, The Chief Executive Leadership Institute celebrated its 100th CEO Summit in New York City.

He is on the board of IEX and the National Council on Aging. He is a member of the Ellis Island Foundation Trustees and is a board member for Advance Connecticut with the Connecticut Economic Resource Center. He formerly served on the boards of the Georgia Governor’s Personnel Commission and the Dekalb County Economic Development Association

Professor Sonnenfeld earned the 2018 Ellis Island award from the US Ellis Island Foundation. He was Harvard's first John Whitehead Faculty Fellow and won outstanding educator awards at Yale, Emory and the American Society for Training and Development. Additionally, he was the winner of ATT's "Hawthorn Award for Social Research in Industry" and Richard D. Irwin Award for Management Research. He was also awarded the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award by the Boy Scouts of America. His work is regularly cited by the general media in such outlets as: Fortune, Business Week, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times; The Economist; Bloomberg; Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, CBS (60 Minutes), NBC (The Today Show), ABC (Nightline, Good Morning America), CNN, and CNBC, where he serves as a staff commentator. Sonnenfeld was listed by Business Week as one of the “ten B-school professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking” and one of the “100 most influential players in corporate governance” by National Association of Corporate Director's Directorship. He is the first academician to have rung the opening bells of both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.

After a decade at Emory University, Sonnenfeld joined the faculty at Yale, bringing with him the CEO College and launching the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, where it still resides. At Yale, he built a new department of Executive Programs, offering 35 programs a year to roughly 2,000 top leaders with sessions in New Haven, New York, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, and Shanghai, and opened Yale University's first outpost in Washington, DC in 2011 with support from Lynn Tilton of Patriarch Partners and Leslie Miller Saointz.

His 2007 book, Firing Back (with Andrew Ward, Harvard Business School Press), studies the paths to resilience for felled CEOs, as well as victims from natural disasters, warfare, and other forms of disruption and adversity. Firing Back looks at various societal and psychological barriers to recovery and offers guidelines for getting lives back on track with a focus on how tragedy is critical for defining heroic careers. At Yale he teaches courses on leading strategic change and executive careers.

Before joining Yale in 1999, he taught for ten years as a professor at the Harvard Business School and nine years as a professor at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Sonnenfeld is widely regarded as a leading international authority on corporate governance, corporate leadership, and a groundbreaking pioneer of CEO learning.

Following the publication of The Hero's Farewell, he left Harvard in 1989 to launch the first school for incumbent CEOs at Emory University, now known as Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. These events produced many firsts such as the first educational forum for media leaders which unified entertainment; journalism, technology, and telecom leaders and the first financial services leadership events to unite insurance, banking, mutual funds, investment banks, and savings and loan leaders with top government regulators. Leaders in converging fields such as Sumner Redstone of Viacom; Michael Dell; Steve Case of AOL; and Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting met each other at these programs. While at Emory, Sonnenfeld was heavily involved in the Atlanta community, working as an advisor to the leadership of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games; a member of the Governor's Personnel Review Commission; and a commissioner of the local county economic development council.

His later books focused on executive careers and succession studies. His work on strategic staffing presented a model of four types of cultures: baseball teams; clubs; academies; and fortresses. His book on CEO succession, The Hero's Farewell: What Happens when CEOs Retire (Oxford University Press, 1988) was the first systematic study of the impact of the exiting incumbent leader upon their organization. In studying the succession of a generation of prominent business leaders, he revealed two frequently misunderstood motives of leaders, in late career: Heroic Mission - a quest for immortal legacy and Heroic Stature - a quest for renown identity. He also developed a typology of departure styles labeled: monarchs; ambassadors; generals; and governors. Based upon this work, Sonnenfeld was asked to head the Blue Ribbon Commission on CEO Succession of the National Association of Corporate Directors.

His scholarly research focus is in management and social responsibility, and he has published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, The Academy of Management Review, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Social Forces, Human Relations, and Human Resource Management, as well as authored many books, including The Hero's Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire (Oxford University Press, 1988) and Firing Back: How Great Leaders Overcome Adversity (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) with Emory alumnus Andrew Ward. Sonnenfeld has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and his professional activities also include membership on various non-profit organization and public company boards.

Sonnenfeld is the founder of Chief Executive Leadership Institute (CELI), a non-profit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance, and the world's first school for chief executives. He pioneered the program as a prototype at the Harvard Business School in 1987 and 1988. In 2000, this institute moved to Yale University where it presently resides.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld (born April 1954) is an academic, Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at Yale School of Management, and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies. Sonnenfeld is the founder of Chief Executive Leadership Institute (CELI), a non-profit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance.

Born in Philadelphia, April 1, 1954, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the son of Burton Sonnenfeld, a men's clothing retailer, and Rochelle Sonnenfeld, a healthcare planner and community leader, who came to the US as a refugee immigrant from Russian pogroms. Sonnenfeld attended public schools in Cheltenham and Abington townships in suburban Montgomery County, Pennsylvania and was an active school leader. While his summers were spent working in the community as an Eagle Scout counselor, he worked through the year in his parents’ retail clothing store in nearby Hatboro, Pennsylvania. He earned his AB, MBA, and doctorate at Harvard University, and during his undergraduate days, he was President of WHRB, the college radio station, as well as an oarsmen. At age 26, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School where he taught for 10 years.