Ideas
Otto Scharmer

Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Otto Scharmer Senior Lecturer, Organization Studies Biography

Otto Scharmer Dr. C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is founding chair of the Presencing Institute, and chairs the MIT IDEAS program. Scharmer helps groups of diverse stakeholders from business, government and civil society to innovate at the level of the whole system. He co-founded the Global Wellbeing and Gross National Happiness (GNH) Lab, which links innovators from Bhutan, Brazil, Europe, and the United States in order to innovate beyond GDP. He is working with governments in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and has delivered award-winning leadership and innovation programs for clients including Alibaba, Daimler, Eileen Fisher, Fujitsu, Google, Natura, and PriceWaterhouse.

Scharmer introduced the concept of “presencing”—learning from the emerging future—in his bestselling books Theory U and Presence (the latter co-authored with P. Senge, J. Jaworski, and B. S. Flowers). His new book Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies (co-authored with Katrin Kaufer) focuses on transforming business, society, and self (published in July 2013).

He currently is a Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Leadership Models. He holds a PhD in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University in Germany. More information about Scharmer and his work can be found at: www.ottoscharmer.com and www.presencing.com