Dr. Michael Lissack

Michael Lissack, DBA is an entrepreneur, author, academic, and speaker. He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE) as well as the founding editor emeritus of ISCE’s journal, Emergence. He is also the president of the American Society for Cybernetics.
 
Michael is the founder of several Internet startups and has been an active angel investor in several more. His original involvement with the Internet came as an investor and advisor to Tripod, a site aimed at university students, which became part of Lycos (now Terra/Lycos) in 1998. He was the acting CFO (1998–99) and a board member of WebMind, a startup technology company whose aim was to utilize the Internet to duplicate the human reasoning processes.
 
In 1999, he founded Collectively Sharper, an artificial intelligence business intelligence firm. Collectively Sharper was sold to Topical Net in 2000. In 2000, he founded Knowledge Ventures Inc. an educational tools software company which published the Learners Library — a research tool for academics. Prior to 1995, Michael was an investment banker where he assisted state and local governments in the United States with debt financings.
 
Worth magazine recognized Michael in 1999 as one of “Wall Street’s 25 Smartest Players” and again in 2001 as one of the 100 Americans who have most influenced “how we think about money.” He was Smith Barney’s senior banker with overall responsibility for new product development, municipal derivatives, and the technical work produced by the firm’s Public Finance Division. He is the author of a half dozen books, director of a research institute, and a frequent lecturer on business ethics.
 
Michael coauthored Coherence in the Midst of Complexity: Advances in Social Complexity Theory and The Next Common Sense: The e-Manager’s Guide to Mastering Complexity, coedited Modes of Explanation: Affordances for Action and Prediction and Managing Complexity in Organizations: A View in Many Directions, and edited The Interaction of Complexity and Management.
 
Michael earned his BA in American Civilization and Political Economy at Williams College in 1979. He earned his MBA in Business at Yale in 1981 and his DBA in Complexity and Management at Henley Business School in 2000.
 
Watch Michael Lissack reflects on his international best-seller “The Next Common Sense”. Read his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed.