Barry Oshry, Ph.D., is President of Power & Systems, Inc., a Boston-based institute founded in 1975 to research and disseminate knowledge about empowerment, power and powerlessness in system life.

A pioneer in systems thinking, Barry has developed educational programs for organizations and institutions throughout the world, among them being Boeing, Whirlpool, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Ashland Chemical, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Yale New Haven Hospital, Harvard University, University of Nebraska, The City of Toronto, the Environmental Protection Agency, The Girl Scouts of America.

He has served on the faculties of Boston College and Boston University where he was Chairman of the Department of Organization Studies. He has also lectured at Rutgers, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Cincinnati, and the Free University of Amsterdam.

Barry has been invited to address national conferences of the American Management Association, The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Shambhala Institute, the American Society for Training & Development, the Association for Quality & Participation, the Society for Human Resource Management, The Human Resource Planning Society, Organization System Designers, as well as the Ecology of Work Conferences, the Teaming for Total Quality Conference, and The Organization Development Network.

His areas of expertise center around the dynamics of organization behavior with particular focus on issues of power, powerlessness, and empowerment. He is the developer of The Organization Workshop: Creating Partnership, the Middle Empowerment Workshop, Merging Cultures, and The Power & Leadership Conference, all of which have been designed to help managers and others explore and add to their understanding of power in organizational life.

He has written extensively on power and systems change and other social system phenomena. His recent book, SEEING SYSTEMS: UNLOCKING THE MYSTERIES OF ORGANIZA-TIONAL LIFE (Berrett-Koehler) has been highly acclaimed. His newest book is LEADING SYSTEMS: LESSONS FROM THE POWER LAB (Berrett-Koehler).

For more information about Barry, visit his website, Power & Systems, Inc.

Return to Management Forum Series 2004-2005