Bio
Zeynep Ton is an adjunct associate professor in Operations Management at MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute (GJI). Before MIT Sloan, Zeynep spent seven years on the faculty at Harvard Business School.
Zeynep’s research explores how companies can design and manage their operations in a way that satisfies customers, employees, and investors simultaneously. In 2014, Zeynep published her findings in a book, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. The book draws on 15 years of research to show that the key to offering good jobs to employees, great service to customers, and superior returns to investors is combining investment in employees with specific operational choices that increase employees’ productivity, contribution, and motivation.
After her book was released, many retail leaders reached out to Zeynep to understand how to implement the Good Jobs Strategy in their organizations, or to describe how they were already adopting the strategy. Zeynep founded GJI to help them transform. GJI offers assessments, workshops and longer term partnerships to support companies on their good jobs journeys.
Zeynep’s research has been published in managerial and scholarly journals, including Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and Organization Science, and featured widely in the media, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, PBS, and NPR. At MIT, Zeynep teaches MBA and executive education courses in operations management, service operations, sustainability, and operations strategy. She received several awards for excellence in teaching both at HBS and MIT Sloan. She was also named one of the World’s 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants.
Zeynep lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. A native of Turkey, she first came to the US on a volleyball scholarship from the Pennsylvania State University. She received her BS in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering there and her DBA from the Harvard Business School.
Links
Business Leaders on The Good Jobs Strategy
Recent Harvard Business Review Big Idea feature ”The Good Jobs Solution”
CNN Fareed Zakaria interview with Zeynep
The New York Times Op-Ed Piece on the Good Jobs Strategy