Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon Biography

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 business books.

Dr. Reardon received her B.A. in secondary education from the University of Connecticut Neag School. She taught high school for six years during which she received her M.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She also obtained her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from UMASS, Amherst in two years with distinction. She taught for six years at the University of Connecticut where she was promoted to
associate professor and awarded tenure. She subsequently became a visiting scholar at
Stanford University.

She was selected for a National Institute of Health Fellowship at the University of Southern California Medical School Department of Preventive Medicine where she conducted research and obtained hundreds of thousands in grants as principal and coprincipal investigator. She developed persuasive protocols to alter risky health habits, especially those of adolescents and young adults. This research focused extensively on inner city youth.

Dr. Reardon was recruited by the Marshall School of Business based on her communication research published in leading journals and the Harvard Business Review. She retained her position in the Medical School forming a joint appointment. She became 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. This program was sponsored by a Kellogg Foundation grant for which Dr. Reardon was principal investigator. She also served as associate director and director of the institute with founder Warren Bennis introducing young people to qualities and actions of effective leaders. She also coached in debate and persuasion two USC teams, champions in 1991, for the Notre Dame Case Competitions.

Dr. Reardon obtained tenure and appointment to full professor in the Department of Management and Organization at USC where she developed courses in negotiation, persuasion, power and politics.

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) founded by Peter Samuelson and later headed by Steven Spielberg, which links critically and terminally ill youth and their families to online education, entertainment, social networking, medical information 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 Washington, D.C. based nonprofit organization devoted to promoting the rights and protection of abused and neglected children. Dr. Reardon originated the idea (in her book Childhood Denied with Christopher Noblet) to establish live-in foster children academies on academic campuses to familiarize foster children with college life and allow them to draw upon the myriad of academic, student/faculty supportive and social services available on campuses. The academies are now being developed under the leadership of First Star founders Peter Samuelson and Sherry Quirk and Executive Director Elissa Garr. Starting with the First Star UCLA Guardian Academy in 2011, First Star is in the process of expanding summer and full-year academies for foster children throughout the country with the goal providing high quality education and increasing the number of foster children who attend and graduate from colleges and universities.

Dr. Reardon has been a speaker and consultant in communication, persuasion, negotiation and leadership 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, Women Lead, and The Young Presidents Organization.

Dr. Reardon is a Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Mortar Board awardee 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 for her dissertation focusing on how children learn to communicate and deal with the unexpected in conversations and relationships. Other than her visiting professorship at Stanford, she has been a Visiting Professor at Trinity College in Dublin and was a Research Scholar at the Irish Management Institute. She serves on the Board of First Star where she is a Distinguished Fellow and on the Harrington Board, guiding the development of a new communication school at the University of Rhode Island.

Her research on international business gift customs has been used by the U.S. Chiefs of Protocol, businesses and chiefs of protocol throughout the U.S. and the world to facilitate relations with leaders of others countries. This research, sponsored by The Parker Pen Company, obtained over 50 million print readership after its release and received the Golden Quill Award from the International Association of Business Communicators.

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.