About Brook Manville
(Web CV here)
Brook Manville is Principal of Brook Manville, LLC. His consulting work focuses on strategy, organization development and transformation, and executive leadership. Brook has a special expertise in knowledge management, organizational learning, leadership development and knowledge-based strategies; he also serves as an executive coach to a wide range of leaders. He today works with organizations in all sectors which in some way pursue “the common good”-- with recent emphasis on major foundations, social innovation organizations, and network-style membership enterprises.
Prior to the launch of his practice, Brook was Executive Vice President of the United Way of America (the U.S.'s largest private charity) and also Director of the United Way Center for Community Leadership. In this role, he led system-wide transformation of the United Way to a new strategy of “community impact,” as well as helping to transition United Way to a global philanthropic institution.
Before joining United Way of America, Brook was Chief Learning Officer and Customer Evangelist of Saba, a Silicon Valley company that remains the leading provider of “e-learning infrastructure” and human capital management solutions. At Saba, Brook was responsible for Saba's thoughtleadership, customer communities, advisory groups, organizational development and several external strategic initiatives.
Brook spent a major part of his career as a partner at McKinsey & Company, specializing in organizational development and knowledge-related strategy. At McKinsey, Brook consulted to several Fortune 500 companies, and also helped lead McKinsey's original knowledge management program. He was also McKinsey's first Director of Knowledge Management, as well as their CIO between 1991 and 1994. Brook was profiled by Tom Peters in his 1991 book Liberation Management, and in Fast Company and Knowledge Management magazines. He is the author of pioneering articles on organizational learning and knowledge management in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and industry publications such as Knowledge Management Review and Inside Knowledge. He is also the author (with Josiah Ober) of A Company of Citizens: What the World's First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). He speaks frequently at conferences and industry groups on these and related topics.
Brook's earlier professional career was a mix of technology, communications, and education. Trained as a historian, Brook was originally on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University (Chicago), an award-winning teacher and author of several academic publications in the field of history, including The Origin of Athenian Citizenship (Princeton 1999). He later worked as a free-lance journalist and subsequently as a business/technology analyst at CBS, Inc. He also helped launch the first online medical information service for physicians in the mid 1980s, in a start-up company called Colleague. Brook holds a Ph.D. in history from Yale (1979) and undergraduate degrees in classics from Oxford (1975) and Yale (1972).
Brook is married to Margarita Egan, with three children, and resides in Bethesda, MD, USA.
Revised August 2011