Eric McNulty

Eric J. McNulty is Associate Director and Program Faculty at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) at Harvard University and an Instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His work centers on leading in high-stakes, high-stress situations. He teaches in multiple executive education programs at Harvard and MIT and graduate-level courses on leadership, negotiation, and conflict resolution at Harvard.

He is the co-author of You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most (PublicAffairs, 2019). McNulty is also -author Renegotiating Health Care: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration (Jossey-Bass, 2011). He is author of e-books Your Critical First 10 Days as a Leader (O’Reilly/Safari, 2015) and Three Critical Shifts for the Evolving Leader (O’Reilly, 2016).

McNulty is the principal author of the NPLI’s case studies on leadership decision making in the Boston Marathon bombing response, innovation in the response to superstorm Sandy, and the professional/political interface in the Deepwater Horizon response drawing upon his firsthand research as well as extensive interviews with leaders involved in the responses.

McNulty is a widely published business author, speaker, and researcher. He was named a Top Thought Leader in Trust in 2018 by Trust Across America. He has written multiple articles for the Harvard Business Review (HBR), strategy+business, Sloan Management Review andmany others. His HBR cases have been anthologized and used in curricula in the U.S. and as far away as France and the Philippines.

McNulty has spoken at conferences and other events, developed content, led trainings and workshops, and facilitated meetings for organizations such as Accenture, the Arthur Page Society, Boston University Questrom School of Business, Clean Gulf, Coca-Cola, Columbia Business School, the Conference Board, Harvard Business Publishing, Humana, IBM, International Institute for Analytics, Microsoft, Nuance, Oil Spill Response Group, O'Reilly Media, Premier Farnell, SAS, Schlumberger (SLB), the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the Transportation Security Administration, United States Secret Service, University of California/San Diego Health, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, UPS, Virtuoso, and other major organizations subject to confidentiality restrictions.

Previously, McNulty was Managing Director for Conferences for Harvard Business Publishing. Prior to that, he held management and communications roles in the private sector. McNulty holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics (with honors) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Master of Arts in Leadership from Lesley University.

He is a member of the Leadership Communications Council at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, the Advisory Council of Crisis Response Journal, and the Future Vision Committee at Disaster Recovery Institute International. McNulty is an active supporter of holistic approaches to conservation through his Elephant Wisdom Project. He is a member of the board of directors of Massachusetts for Elephants. He is a former board member of The Family Center (now The Parenting Journey) in Somerville, MA and former member of the Executive Council at Boston PBS affiliate WGBH.