Curriculum Vitae: Michael R. Lissack

2338 Immokalee Rd. #292, Naples FL 34110

 

phone: 239-254-9648

email:    Lissack@lissack.com

web:     http://www.lissack.com/

http://www.isce.edu/

http://www.emergence.org/

http://www.instantknowledge.com/

Michael Lissack is the director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE) as well as the editor-in-chief of ISCE's journal, Emergence. Dr. Lissack is also the founder and chairman of Knowledge Ventures Inc. 

Education

DBA, Henley Management College (UK), 2000.

MBA, Yale School of Management 1981. 

BA, Williams College (US) 1979.

Organizational Skills

Prior to 1995, Dr. Lissack was an investment banker where he assisted state and local governments in the United States with debt financings.  His specialty was infrastructure project financings, from which he gained significant organizational acumen while running project teams of upwards of fifty professionals. 

Beginning in 1995, Dr. Lissack organized an Internet mailing list of professionals and academics interested in the fields of complexity and management.  The community formed around the list became the basis of first, the Organization Science Related Programs unit of the New England Complex Systems Institute (1997-1999) and then (1999 to date) the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence.

Since 1997, Dr. Lissack has organized several international conferences on complexity and management (Managing the Complex – Toronto, Fall 1998, Boston, Spring 1999, Boston, Fall 1999, Boston, Spring 2000) and on such topics as “Entanglement at the Human Scale” (Utrecht, Fall 2000), health care and ethics (Boston, Fall 1999), and knowledge management (Boston, Spring 2001).  These conferences have attracted a wide variety of academics, business professionals and consultants – who make up the affiliated membership in ISCE.

ISCE appointed its first academic fellows in 2000 – forty in number from around the globe, who gather twice a year for an academic confab and who work together on research projects, publications and speaking engagements.  ISCE began its online academic resource program in 2000 and has an extensive on-line full text library for the use of the fellows and academic members.

Since 1999, Dr. Lissack has been the editor-in-chief of Emergence: A Journal of Complexity Issues in Organizations and Management.  Dr. Lissack founded the journal and arranged for its publication by Lawrence Earlbaum Associates (a noted academic publisher in the United States).  As editor-in-chief, he has been responsible for gathering the journal’s editorial board, promulgating its editorial policies, soliciting manuscripts, reviewing and promoting the journal.

The ISCE book series with Quorum Books was begun in 1999 and is an outgrowth of the ISCE conferences and workshops. 

At ISCE Dr. Lissack has been developing an international consortium with members including the Imagination Lab (Lausanne), the University for Humanist Studies (Utrecht), the Cal Turner Program in Moral Leadership Across the Professions at Vanderbilt University (Nashville), and the University of Technology Sydney.  One outgrowth of this consortia is a PhD program in corporate anthropology.

In 2000, Dr. Lissack founded two technology start-up firms, Collectively Sharper Inc and Knowledge Ventures Inc.  As founder Dr. Lissack had to articulate a vision, recruit senior staff, establish financing, organize offices, establish partnerships with major firms, engage in fundraising and in sales.

Collectively Sharper served enterprise clients in North America and Western Europe by delivering a software platform product to integrate content and “knowledge technologies.” It was designed to be easy to use, easy to deploy, and easily extended to make use of other legacy content and technologies within any organization. Collectively Sharper was sold to TopicalNet in September, 2001.

Knowledge Ventures, Inc. is an educational tools software company. KV has three products: Authority Finder, CiteMaster, and the Virtual Research Assistant. Authority Finder is a simple and intuitive querying tool that allows one to locate relevant quotations and corresponding citations from a list of authoritative academic journals, in support of key ideas or thesis statements. CiteMaster is a text matching application designed to identify instances of potential plagiarism in submitted documents, and to provide correct citation information for each suspected instance.The virtual research assistant clips information from any article or book supplied to the database, pastes it into the researcher’s work and then provides the footnote and bibliographic entry in the approved Modern Language Association’s recommended style.   

Public Policy and Investment Banking

Worth magazine recognized Dr. Lissack in 1999 as one of "Wall Street's 25 Smartest Players" and again in 2001 as on of the 100 Americans who have most influenced “how we think about money.” He was Smith Barney's senior banker with overall responsibility for new product development, municipal derivatives, and the technical work produced by the firm's Public Finance Division. He trained more than 300 bankers who can be found at firms throughout the industry. He has served as a senior banker or financial advisor in more than thirty of the fifty American states, and has financed more than $35 billion of infrastructure projects for these clients. As the senior banker for these governmental entities, Dr. Lissack directed more than $25 billion of investments, supervised their financial reporting, assisted in the design of their risk management and investment operations, and coordinated public education programs. He spent more than 13 years with Smith Barney, including eight as a managing director.

In the US, Dr. Lissack has acquired a national reputation as a whistle blower following his role in exposing the arcane world of municipal finance. In April 1998, the US Department of Justice announced that it had joined in a whistleblower suit Dr. Lissack filed regarding the repayment of nearly $1 billion to the US Treasury.  Since then the US Government has recovered more than $250 million as the result of Dr. Lissack's initiation of legal action.  Since his first public accusations in March 1995, he has been responsible for shedding light on numerous illegal and unethical practices of Wall Street firms. His allegations have been involved in more than one dozen civil and criminal investigations by the SEC, IRS and the US Department of Justice and in the promulgation of IRS Revenue Procedure 96-41. The investment practices of many state and local governments throughout the United States have been revised as a result of Dr. Lissack’s initiative. Dr. Lissack has written editorials on the subject of whistle blowing for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and has been profiled in many international publications including Fortune, Business Week, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and USA Today. In addition, he has spoken about whistle blowing on television, radio, and the lecture circuit. Dr. Lissack has devoted the bulk of monies derived from his lawsuits to charitable activities including ISCE and has endowed two professorships -- the Lissack chair in Social Responsibility and Personal Ethics at Williams College, and the ISCE Professorship for Meaning in Organizations at the University for Humanist Studies in the Netherlands.

Internet

Dr. Lissack is the founder of several Internet start-ups and has been an active angel investor in several more.  His original involvement with the Internet came as an investor and advisor to Tripod, a site aimed at university students, which became part of Lycos (now Terra/Lycos) in 1998.  In 2000, Dr. Lissack founded Knowledge Ventures, an Internet technology company aimed at the academic sector whose mission is to develop solutions to dramatically improve the online research experience. Knowledge Ventures employs technology to simplify and eliminate steps in the online research process allowing students, teachers and librarians to find more relevant content faster and more intuitively. Knowledge Ventures is also in the process of launching a tool for checking citations and monitoring plagiarism.

Dr. Lissack was the acting CFO (1998-99) and a board member of WebMind, Inc., a start-up technology company whose aim was to utilize the Internet to duplicate the human reasoning processes.  While WebMind’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, the start-up organization and failure experience contributed greatly to Dr. Lissack’s education.

Dr. Lissack founded the COMPLEX-M mailing list -- an Internet mail list and discussion forum on the relationship between the complexity sciences and management – in 1995.  As moderator he has guided its growth to more than 650 members. 

The Complex-M list can be found at http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/complex-m.html

Teaching

Since 1995, Dr. Lissack has taught economics as a lecturer at Williams, research techniques at Henley, business strategy at IMD, complexity at LSE, and business ethics at the Rotterdam School of Management, Vanderbilt, and Keele.  He has run seven international conferences on the topics of complexity, management, health care, entanglement and ethics.  Dr. Lissack frequently lectures on the topics of complexity, management, ethics, and knowledge management to both academic and business audiences in the US and Europe.

Research

Dr. Lissack’s ongoing research focuses on the use of complexity theory based metaphors and models in the management of knowledge related businesses and the impacts of the Internet on such management. His doctoral research focused on one such Internet company, Tripod, which is now part of Terra/Lycos. His most recent writings have focused on the concept of coherence, what it is and how it can be achieved and maintained in a dynamic networked setting. Dr. Lissack devotes significant research effort in the arena of knowledge management examining the role that networks and the Internet play in how knowledge is disseminated, validated, and used by both people and computers. Dr. Lissack’s post-doctoral assistants are researching the impacts of networking effects and complexity on society as a whole, on management, and on the military. He and several colleagues are finishing a management textbook (MBA level) that stresses the situated nature of management, where the lessons presented involve multiple perspectives and multiple paradigms and where the coherence aimed for is not based on homogeneity of perspective, but on a recognition of ‘appropriateness’.

 

Publications

“Be Coherent, Not Visionary,” Long Range Planning (34) 2001.

 

“Complexity Science: A ‘Gray’ Science for the ‘Stuff in Between’” (with Kurt Richardson and Paul Cilliers) Emergence, Volume 3, No. 2, 2001.

Converging on Coherence (with Hugo Letiche), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (forthcoming, 2003).

Management Redefined (with Johan Roos and Kurt Richardson), Pearson Education, London (forthcoming 2003).

Management and Complexity: An Interacting Dialogue (edited with Jan Rivkin) Quorum Books, Westport, (forthcoming 2002).

The Next Common Sense: The E-Manager's Guide to Mastering Complexity (with Johan Roos), Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, 2000.

"Knowledge Management Redux: Reframing a Consultancy Fad into a Practical Tool" Emergence, Volume 2, No. 3, 2000.

The Next Common Sense (with Johan Roos), Nicholas Brealey Publishers, London, 1999.  

Managing Complexity in Organizations: A View in Many Directions (editor, with Hugh Gunz), Quorum Books, Westport, 1999.

"Complexity: the Science, its Vocabulary, and its Relation to Organizations" Emergence, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1999.

 "Concept Sampling: A New Twist for Content Analysis" Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1998.

"Of Chaos and Complexity: Managerial Insights From A New Science" Management Decision, Vol. 35, 1997, Number 3.

"Mind Your Metaphors: Lessons From Complexity Science" Long Range Planning,  April 1997.

"Chaos and Complexity: What Does That Have to Do with Knowledge Management?" in Knowledge Management: Organization, Competence and Methodology, ed. J. F. Schreinemakers. Wurzburg, Germany, Ergon Verlog. (1997) 1: 62-81. 

 

 

Relevant web sites:

 

 

1)      http://www.isce.edu/

 

The Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence

 

2)      http://www.emergence.org/

 

Emergence: A Journal of Complexity Issues in Organizations and Management

 

3)      http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/complex-m.html

 

COMPLEX-M is an Internet discussion group Dr. Lissack founded in 1995

 

4)      http://www.meansbusiness.com/Leadership-and-Change-Books/The-Next-Common-Sense.htm

 

Summary of The Next Common Sense from MeansBusiness, a concept database of 20,000 key ideas from business and management books.

 

5)      http://info.greenwood.com/books/1567202/1567202853.html

 

The catalog description of Managing Complexity in Organizations: A View in Many Directions

 

6)      http://www.mgeneral.com/5-top/99-top/lissack.htm

 

Management General’s website “provides vanguard thinking about management and leadership”

 

7)      http://www.whistleblowers.com/HTML/BODY/MooneyLissack.htm