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Harrington School of Communication and Media

Advisory Board

Kathleen Reardon

Kathleen K. Reardon

Professor, The Marshall School, University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Professor of Management and Organization in the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business has served on the faculty of the MBA, Executive MBA, International MBA Programs and the faculty of Preventive Medicine. She is a leading authority on persuasion, politics in the workplace, negotiation, and interpersonal communication. She is the author of nine books and numerous articles published in communication and business journals, including three times in the Harvard Business Review. The Secret Handshake: Mastering the Politics of the Business Inner Circle, It’s All Politics, and Comebacks at Work (with Christopher Noblet) are her latest books.

Dr. Reardon was Director of the Sample Presidential Fellows Program of the USC Leadership Institute training selected graduate students from a wide variety to fields to be socially conscious leaders. She also served as associate director of the institute with founder Warren Bennis. She served on the prestigious Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award Panel and the Editorial Boards of several academic journals. She was elected to the Board of the International Communication Association and served on the Annenberg EC2 Incubator Selection Board for promising entrepreneurial start-ups. She was co-principal investigator on the feasibility study that launched the Starbright Foundation (now Starlight) headed by Steven Spielberg, which links critically and terminally ill children and their families to online education, entertainment, social networking and social support.

She served on the Marshall School of Business Dean’s Advisory Council, the Employers Group Board of Directors and the Founding Advisory Board of First Star, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting the rights and protection of children. Dr. Reardon originated the idea (in her book Childhood Denied) to establish live-in foster children academies on academic campuses now being developed under the leadership of film producer and First Star founder, Peter Samuelson.

Dr. Reardon has been a speaker and consultant for such organizations as The Conference Board, The Los Angeles Town Hall Executive Series, Avery Dennison, CIGNA, ITT, Epson, Hewlett Packard, Accountants Overload, ARCO, AT&T, Toyota, IBM Watson Research Center, Moog Aircraft, SONY Entertainment, NASA Jet Propulsion Labs, Siemens Corp., NewsCorp, Pfizer, and The Young Presidents Organization.

Dr. Reardon is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Connecticut (B.A.) and received her M.A. and Ph.D. summa cum laude and with distinction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The National Communication Association awarded her the Top Dissertation Award. She has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University and Trinity College in Dublin. She has appeared on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Bloomberg, NPR and hundreds of other media outlets. She has also been a featured blogger since 2005 at Huffingtonpost.com.