John Pourdehnad, PhD Affiliated Faculty, Organizational Dynamics; Associate Director, Ackoff Collaboratory for Advancement of Systems Approaches; Adjunct Professor, Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science School of Engineering and Applied Science 220 S. 33rd St., Room 276 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 Phone: 610-256-0676 Fax: 610-640-4103 E-mail: jp2consult@aol.com Website: http://www.acasa.upenn.edu/faculty.htm

Biography

John Pourdehnad is Affiliated Faculty, Organizational Dynamics. He is also Associate Director, Ackoff Collaboratory for Advancement of Systems Approaches and Adjunct Professor, Systems Engineering, in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Dr. Pourdehnad is engaged in the field of organizational management, using systems thinking as a world view and communicating its implications for management. As a scholar-practitioner he has been involved with numerous projects helping management teams with the resolution of complex problems. He has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, worked as an educator/consultant with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations and government agencies, and has also been a co-principal investigator in a number of research programs.

His primary areas of interest include implications of systems thinking in complex problem formulation (including complex project management) and systems redesign. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal, Systems Research and Behavioral Science; a member of the Academy of Management ; and an honorary member of the Society for Organizational Excellent in Bulgaria. His applied scholarship also includes knowledge development in the creation of new products and services, and the development of socio-technical systems for learning and knowledge-to-wisdom management in complex adaptive systems. He has also been integrating a series of thematic concepts such as idealized design, business model design, open innovation and Enterprise 2.0 into an integrated workable whole.

He is a leader in “design thinking,” is a Fellow of the Da Vinci Institute for Technology and Management in Rivonia Gauteng, South Africa, and in February, 2008 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to visit the New Bulgarian University in Sophia, Bulgaria to help create the "Design Institute" for the practice of design thinking using trans-disciplinary teams to cope with complex and intractable problems. In Bulgaria and globally, he has presented lectures, mostly on systems thinking, in various educational, corporate and government institutions.

Dr. Pourdehnad received his PhD in Systems Sciences from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania .

Publications

Among his many publications are:

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