More about the Author…. Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon

Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Professor Emerita of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, has served on the faculty of the MBA, Executive MBA and International MBA programs and on the research faculty of Preventive Medicine. She was named Distinguished Research Scholar by the Irish Management Institute and has been a visiting professor at Trinity, University College Dublin and University College Cork.

Kathleen’s wrting and research focus on workplace politics, persuasion/negotiation and gender issues. Her medical research is primarily concerned with preventing disease through persuasive interventions. She is the author of ten nonfiction books and numerous articles published in communication and business journals, including the Harvard Business Review. She authored the HBR reprint bestseller The Memo Every Woman Keeps in her Desk and Courage as a Skill. Her books on politics at work are The Secret Handshake: Mastering the Politics of the Business Inner Circle, It’s All Politics, and Comebacks at Work.

Kathleen directed the University of Southern California Leadership Institute with Warren Bennis. She ran the Institue fellows program and taught courses in leadership and diversity there with one of the leading lights of the modern feminist movement, Betty Friedan.

From 2005 to 2017 Kathleen was a front-page blogger with The Huffington Post. She has also blogged at Big Think, The Guardian Conversation and Thrive Global and writes for the Harvard Business Review online, including a recent article on her Spectrum of Sexual Misconduct.

She was co-principal investigator on the Starbright Foundation feasibility study spearheaded by producer Peter Samuelson and later chaired by Steven Spielberg. The Foundation links critically and terminally ill children and their families to online education, entertainment, social networking and social support. She also originated and co-founded with Samuelson First Star pre-college academies for foster teens now throughout the U.S. and in the UK. In 2013, the University of Connecticut Alumni Association named her Humanitarian of the Year.

Kathleen has consulted or spoken to such organizations as Siemens, CIGNA, Epson, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, Steuben Glass, Loewe, Toyota, IBM Watson Research Center, Sony Entertainment, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, News Corp, Pfizer, the Young Presidents Organization, AIB, Noyce Leadership Institute and General Motors. Her seminal work on international gift-giving practices in negotiation has been used by governments, chiefs of protocol and businesses around the world.

Kathleen is a Phi Beta Kappa, Mortar Board and Phi Kappa Phi graduate of the University of Connecticut and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. summa cum laude and with distinction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

She is also an oil and watercolour artist and published her first crime mystery, Shadow Campus, in 2013. Forbes described it as a “masterful” and “fast-paced” debut. Her

second crime mystery, Damned if She Does, described by Kirkus Reviews as “informed and searing” was published in 2020. The Audible/iTunes version was released in March of 2021. Kirkus selected it as one of twenty-four “Great Indie Books Worth Discovering.”

Kathleen lives in Schull, West Cork Ireland and is a member of the International Women’s Forum.