David Korten | |
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Born | 1937 Longview, Washington |
Occupation | Teacher, institutional systems analyst, environmentalist, activist, and author |
Alma mater | Stanford University Graduate School of Business (MBA, Ph.D.) |
Genre | Localized economies, ecological economics, environmental economics, alternative energy, living economies, sustainability, climate change |
Spouse | Frances Fisher Korten |
Website | |
davidkorten |
David C. Korten (born 1937) is an American author, former professor of the Harvard Business School, political activist, prominent critic of corporate globalization, and "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems". His best-known publication is, When Corporations Rule the World (1995 and 2001). In 2011, he was named an Utne Reader visionary.
David Korten was born in Longview, Washington, in 1937 and is a 1955 graduate of its R. A. Long High School. He received a master of business administration and Ph.D. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He said: "My early career [after leaving Stanford in 1959] was devoted to setting up business schools in low-income countries—starting with Ethiopia". He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force, undertaking U.S.-based teaching and organizational duties; and for five and a half years was a visiting professor in the Harvard Business School. While at Stanford in the 1950s, he married Frances Fisher Korten, with whom he now lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington.
Korten served for five and a half years as a visiting associate professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where he taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A., and doctoral programs.
He also served as the Harvard Business School adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Institute of Business Administration. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.