Derek van Bever
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Derek van Bever is a Senior Lecturer in the General Management Unit of Harvard Business School. He teaches courses in both years of the MBA program (“Leadership and Corporate Accountability” in the first-year required curriculum and “Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise” in the second year elective curriculum), and he is the faculty lead for the Executive Education course entitled “Disruptive Innovation.” In the Spring 2025 term, he is debuting a new course entitled "The Spiritual Lives of Leaders," which grows out of a popular J-Term SIP (Short Intensive Program) of the same name. This course brings together the domains of management and spirituality, faith and leadership, and has been developed with faculty partners from four other Harvard graduate programs. The course brings together leaders from the private and public sectors to discuss with students how their faith and spiritual commitments and practices shape their agency and ambition. He is also the Director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation, a research project founded by Professor Clayton Christensen that is focused on discovering, developing and disseminating predictive theory on management and innovation.
Derek is a co-founder of The Advisory Board Company, a global research, consulting, and technology firm serving hospital and university executives, and he was a member of the founding executive team of The Corporate Executive Board, a global thought leadership and advisory network, which spun out of the Advisory Board Company in a highly successful 1999 Initial Public Offering. The Corporate Executive Board, acquired by Gartner Group in 2017, is now the world’s largest executive advisory network, with a membership spanning over 50 countries and including executives from 85% of the Fortune 500 and 50% of the Dow Jones Asian Titans.
In his role as Chief Research Officer for the Corporate Executive Board, Derek directed teams studying best practices in strategy, innovation, talent management, finance and governance in the large-corporate sector worldwide. He oversaw the development and launch of the firm’s new practice areas following the IPO, and he led the development of the firm’s internal corporate academy. He co-authored the book Stall Points, an analysis of the growth experience of the Fortune 100 across the past half-century, which was published by Yale University Press in 2008. An article based on the book, entitled “When Growth Stalls,” appeared in the May 2008 Harvard Business Review and won the McKinsey Award for that year. His survey of the CEOs of newly-public companies, “The Perfect Storm: How the IPO Experience Threatens Good Work for Leaders of the Young Public Company,” was published as part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s GoodWork series, edited by Howard Gardner. He and Professor Christensen co-authored a number of articles in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Foreign Affairs with members of the Forum research staff.
Derek is a 1988 graduate of HBS and a 2011 graduate of Harvard Divinity School. His divinity school thesis, “A Mission Beyond Commerce,” examines the challenges to personal and corporate mission posed by pivot points such as a change of ownership or leadership transition and suggests practices and disciplines for retaining a sense of perspective in the “high hurry” of business life. His current research interests include the circumstances that allow leading incumbent organizations to respond correctly to disruptive entrants, as well as the broken reinvestment cycle in market-creating innovation in the large corporate sector.
Derek lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their children, Grace, Owen and Graham. He serves on the board of directors of FranklinCovey and is on the ordination path for ministry in the United Church of Christ.
