About John Burrows

John Burrows is senior lecturer in leadership at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He also teaches healthcare leadership in a newly launched double masters degree program in health policy taught jointly by the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics & Political Science. Previously, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Before entering academia, John’s career spanned the public, private, and NGO sectors. He originally came to the USA from the UK to volunteer at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Project. During college he interned with other anti-death penalty groups and also at the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. Later he joined Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Service (OGS) and led engagements with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

John later switched into the private sector, where he was a partner with the consulting firm Accenture and held senior roles in sales and marketing at enterprise software companies including Siebel and Oracle. He negotiated, sold, managed, and implemented complex, multi-national, multi-million dollar projects around the globe, and gained experience building and growing operations in the UK, USA, and Japan, grappling with all that that entails: BD, IJVs, M&A, etc. During his PhD studies John served as an advisor for Houses for Africa, a social enterprise firm based in Cape Town, South Africa.

At the University of Chicago and Oxford, John teaches leadership, negotiations, strategy, decision-making, and organizational psychology to MPP, MBA, and MA students, and to senior executives in open enrollment and custom executive-education programs. Custom executive education clients of John's include AbbVie, Alfa, American College of Surgeons, American Orthopaedic Association, Aon, BBVA, Brainlab, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), Civil Service Bureau of Hong Kong, Edelman, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), Kiewit, Kuwait University College of Business Administration, Merrill Lynch, State Farm, Syngenta, Trelleborg, and Workiva. 

For three years now, John has also taught each cohort of the University of Chicago's International Innovation Corp (IIC) Fellows Program. The IIC recruits top-performing graduates of leading host-country universities and US based institutions and organizes them into teams of up to 3-5 Project Associates. Project Associates train for 5 weeks in skills required to translate their academic and professional knowledge into on-the-ground contributions. The IIC embeds each team within a government, non-profit, or foundation office in India or Brazil to work on an innovative development project with a discrete, tractable scope for 1-3 year projects. Last year, John taught in the University of Chicago Data and Policy Summer Scholar Program which offers top global undergraduate students a 4-week experience with rigorous training on data analytics and public policy.

John is a sought-after speaker across industries but especially within healthcare. He has presented to the American College of Surgeons (ACS), including to their Board of Regents, and delivered a grand rounds lecture to the University of Chicago’s Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation. John has also delivered keynote speeches for the American Orthopaedic Association (AOA) and the Association of Program Directors in Surgery (APDS).

John currently serves on the advisory board of Profitable Ideas Exchange (PIE), which builds communities of senior executive to tackle many of the world’s greatest challenges, and consults with clients across industries and geographies.

John received a Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and an A.B. from Vassar College.