Richard L. Daft

Richard L. Daft, born in 1941, is an American organizational theorist and the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska and both an MBA and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. He has made fundamental contributions to the study of organization behavior and organization design, co-developed media richness theory with Robert H. Lengel, and is one of the most widely cited scholars in management. At Vanderbilt he developed and managed the Center for Change Leadership and served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs, and he is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. His many textbooks, including Management, Leadership and Understanding the Theory and Design of Organizations, are widely used in management education.