We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.  That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us.

- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I view my mission as a scholar as one of introducing high quality, rigorous, academic research to the study of positive dynamics and organizational excellence. My general approach to research draws upon the underlying notion of life as a fundamental aspect of organizing. My main research assumption is that organizations have the potential to enliven or deaden the people who live and work within them, and that this is a central property in our experience of organizing. Once scholars and managers see organizations as sites of life, we begin to ask new questions about people in organizations, about systemic properties of organizations, and about the generative intersection between people and structures.

Three interrelated themes are woven through all of my research and develop directly from asking questions about life.

• The first of these themes is emotion. Organizational research is enjoying a renewed emphasis on understanding the role of emotion and the ways that it shapes people’s experiences in organizations. My work builds on this growing emphasis, placing emotion at the very core of concepts such as courage and compassion.
• The second of these themes is the aesthetic. I draw upon work that views organizations as aesthetic and symbolic systems, just as they have been conceptualized as rational and economic systems.
• The third of these themes is narrative. My work builds strong links between the stories people tell and the ways that we understand organizational processes.

In developing a new perspective on organizations as sites of life, I have drawn primarily on two specific topics that provide insight for a more general theory. The first of these topics is courage. Concepts such as courage have rarely been the subject of rigorous empirical study, yet my research finds that courage is omnipresent in work organizations. Courage is consequential in organizations because it changes what people assume to be possible.

The second of these specific topics is compassion. With my colleagues in the CompassionLab, I have written about compassion as an element of life in organizations, studied compassion as an organizing force, and explored the importance of compassion for organizational leadership and organizational outcomes. CompassionLab has written for research journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and the Academy of Management Journal, and for management audiences in such places as the Leader to Leader and Harvard Business Review.