John Burrows

About John Burrows

John Burrows is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He teaches leadership, negotiations, decision-making, strategy, and organizational psychology to degree-seeking undergraduate and graduate students and senior executives in open enrollment and custom executive-education programs. At Harris, John is also the Academic Director for Part-Time Programs and Leadership, and at UChicago more broadly John is a founding faculty member of the McKeon Center.

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.

John is a sought-after speaker and consultant across industries and sectors. Clients of his include Accenture, American College of Surgeons (ACS), American Orthopaedic Association (AOA), American Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), Aon, ARCO Design Build, Association of Program Directors in Surgery (APDS), BNY Mellon, BrainLab, Capgemini, Civil Service Bureau of Hong Kong, CVS Aetna, CUES, eBay, Edelman, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, IWI Wealth Advisors, Kiewit, Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), Saudi Government’s Decision Support Center (DSC), Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), State Farm, State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), U.S. Army War College, U.S. Navy, and Women in Leadership Insurance.

John received his PhD in Behavioral Science and MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, his MSt in Practical Ethics from Pembroke College, Oxford, and his AB in Psychology from Vassar College.