Ed Morrison

Non-Executive director

For over 25 years Ed Morrison, founder and director of the Agile Strategy Lab at Purdue University, has been studying challenges related to how humans collaborate and engage in complex work. In that time, he pioneered the development of Strategic Doing, a new approach to strategy and complex collaboration in open, loosely connected networks.

Ed has developed a new discipline called Strategic Doing to accelerate these collaborations that is now widely used across the U.S. and is now gaining attention internationally. Ed and the team continue the development of this discipline through the Agile Strategy Labs at the University of North Alabama, the University of Puerto Rico and Purdue University.

He is also a co-author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership (Wiley, 2019), which outlines this new discipline of leadership strategy with practical ways to unleash the power of collaborative networks. The book summarizes work Edward the team have completed over 25 years and is a #1 Amazon New Release in 6 categories.
Ed and the team first pioneered the approach in Oklahoma City in the early 1990s, with a group of civic leaders that wanted to revive their downtown. Today, the city’s downtown is vibrant and thriving. This success was replicated in Charleston, South Carolina. The Charleston Digital Corridor effort led to investments in fledgling software and other high-technology companies – and a #2 ranking among mid-size cities for its support of entrepreneurs.

Effective collaborations to improve the productivity life scientists at NASA, designing and guiding an open innovation ecosystem at Lockheed for The US Navy, with fresh water technology developing a global water cluster from its home base in Milwaukee (The Water Council) are some of the other success stories of the application of Strategic Doing.
Prior to starting this work, Edward worked for Telesis, a corporate strategy consulting firm. In this position, has served on consulting teams for clients such as Ford Motor Company, Volvo and General Electric. Edward has also conducted manufacturing cost studies in the U.S., Japan, Mexico, Canada, Italy, Sweden and France.

Ed started his professional career in Washington, D.C., serving as a legislative assistant to an Ohio Congressman, staff attorney in the Federal Trade Commission and staff counsel in the U.S. Senate. He received a B.A. degree cum laude with honours in African Studies from Yale University and M.B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Virginia.