Chris Argyris

Chris Argyris (1923 to 2013) was an American business theorist and professor at the Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School, known as a pioneer of organization development and for his seminal work on learning organizations. Born in Newark, New Jersey, to a family of Greek immigrants, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II, studied psychology at Clark University, where he met Kurt Lewin, and completed his graduate degrees at the University of Kansas and Cornell University. He began teaching at Yale in 1951 and moved to Harvard in 1971. With Donald Schon he developed the ideas of double-loop learning and theory-in-use, and with Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith he advanced action science. His books include Personality and Organization (1957), Organizational Learning (1978) and Overcoming Organizational Defenses (1990). He died on 16 November 2013.