Thomas R. Eisenmann

Thomas R. Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He studies processes for launching new ventures, with a focus on the lean startup approach. Professor Eisenmann is Chair of Harvard's MBA Elective Curriculum—the second year of the MBA Program—and Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. He also is course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, taught to all 900 first-year MBA students, and faculty co-leader of the Harvard Innovation Lab-sponsored New York City Winter Break Trip, in which students from across Harvard explore entrepreneurship in cultural industries. In recent years, Eisenmann co-led four Winter Break trips to Silicon Valley, and he created two MBA electives, Launching Technology Ventures, which examines challenges that entrepreneurs encounter when starting and scaling new ventures; and Managing Networked Business (now called The Online Economy), which surveys strategies for platform-based businesses that leverage network effects.

Professor Eisenmann received his DBA ('98), MBA ('83), and BA ('79) from Harvard University. Prior to entering the HBS Doctoral Program, Eisenmann spent eleven years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. As co-head of McKinsey's Media and Entertainment Practice during the early 1990s, he directed teams addressing strategic, organizational, and operational issues for clients engaged in network broadcasting; cable programming; newspaper, magazine, and book publishing; and motion picture production.

Eisenmann is a director on the boards of Harvard Business Publishing and Harvard Student Agencies. He was a member of the board of directors of OneMain.com, one of the ten largest U.S. Internet Service Providers prior to its acquisition.