FACULTY

Marty Linsky, except for a stint as Chief Secretary and Counselor to Massachusetts Governor William Weld (1992-95), has been at the Kennedy School since 1979. He serves as faculty chair of several of the School's other executive programs, The Art and Practice of Leadership Development. He is co-founder, with Ronald Heifetz, of Cambridge Leadership Associates, (http://www.cambridge-leadership.com), a leadership consulting, training and coaching practice. A graduate of Williams College and Harvard Law School, Linsky has been a journalist, a lawyer and politician. He has served as a Member and Assistant Minority Leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; a reporter and editorial writer for The Boston Globe; and editor of The Real Paper. His most recent book is a co-authorship with Dr. Heifetz entitled, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002). For relaxation, he runs (9 marathons), enjoys good beer and Mexican food (as a reward for the running) and collects baseball cards (over 25,000 of them). He has three children and lives in New York City with his wife Lynn Staley, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek Magazine.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Hauser Center research fellow. A former community planner and senior U.S. government official, his work is about racial and ethnic diversity, inequality, and democracy in cities. With support from the Center, he launched The Community Problem-Solving Project a unique online resource on civic leadership and collective action across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. He is also conducting comparative research on cross-sector politics and management at the local level in the U.S., Brazil, India, and South Africa, through a book project called Democracy as Problem-Solving: The Civics of Change in Communities Across the Globe. This project is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Ford Foundation.

Xav’s research has appeared in leading journals in sociology, planning, and public policy. His new book is an edited volume, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings, 2005). A former faculty member in public policy at Harvard, where he received the Carballo Prize for teaching excellence, he has consulted to leading national and international organizations, such as The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and The World Bank. In the public sector, he ran the Clinton Administration’s urban policy research and development unit at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change and other advisory groups. His views have appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, National Public Radio, and other major media.

Linda Kaboolian is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Her research and teaching focus on multi-stakeholder problem solving processes around workplace and public policy issues. She works with labor, management and community groups around improved organizational performance and service to diverse communities. She has a number of projects in public education and the water industry. Her new book, Win-Win Labor-Management Collaboration in Education was published this year. She co-authored Working Better Together: A Practical Guide for Union Leaders, Elected Officials and Managers and The Concord Handbook distilling several years of fieldwork about organizations that bridge racial, ethnic, and class divides. While she now serves as a neutral mediator, she was an elected officer and chief bargainer of a union, and a senior manager in the federal government. She has also served in the state and local and non-profit sectors. Kaboolian received her PhD from the University of Michigan.