page_title: Igor Ansoff
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Igor Ansoff / Biography / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Igor Ansoff, 1971
context_page_description: Harry Igor Ansoff was a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager. He is known as the father of strategic management.
context_section_description: Seeking a broader perspective, he received a Master's degree in Modern Physics. World War II intervened, and in 1946 he went to Brown University to get a Doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics. His formal education was completed in 1948 when he was 30 years old. He was married the day after defending his dissertation to his wife Skip, and then traveled to Santa Monica, California, where he joined UCLA in the Senior Executive Program.  
  During World War II, he was a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve, and served as a Liaison with the Russian Navy and as an instructor in physics at the U.S. Naval Academy.
  In California, he was offered a job in the Mathematics Department of the RAND Corporation. Moving laterally within RAND, Igor become a Project Manager in the large-scale project activity focused on making recommendations to the U.S. Air Force on technology and weapon systems acquisition. His second major study at RAND addressed the vulnerability of NATO Air Forces. The inclusion of  "soft metrics" was treated with disdain by RAND and the airforce, and Igor learned his first lesson in organizational myopia, which was to become one of his primary concerns some 20 years later.
  In 1957 Igor left RAND to join the Corporate Planning Department of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. At Lockheed he became Vice President of Planning and Director of Diversification. His experience at Lockheed focused his attention and trained him to deal with the problem of managing organizations in the face of environmental discontinuities which became the central focus of his attention during the following 30 years.
  One morning while shaving Igor realized that he had no idea of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. While on vacation at Cape Cod he developed a long-term plan to take early retirement from Lockheed and find a job in a school of management. Within a year he was approached by The Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Mellon University about joining the GSIA faculty. When he entered GSIA he was allowed a year free from teaching to enable him to finish his book, Corporate Strategy, which was published in 1965 and was an immediate success. He served as Professor of Industrial Administration in the Graduate School at Carnegie Mellon University from 1963 until 1968.
  In 1969 he accepted a position as Founding Dean of the new Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He accepted the position under the condition that the school would specialize in educating change agents, a type of manager which was badly needed in industry and not produced by any U.S. school of business at that time. He worked as a Professor of Management there until 1973.
  
  In 1983 he joined the U.S. International University (now Alliant International University) where he created the school's strategic management program. 
  Professionally, he is known worldwide for his research in three specific areas:
  The concept of environmental turbulence;
  The contingent strategic success paradigm, a concept that has been validated by numerous doctoral dissertations;
  Real-time strategic management.
  Marketing and MBA students are usually familiar with his Ansoff Matrix, a tool he created to plot generic strategies for growing a business, via existing or new products, in existing or new markets.
  He has consulted with hundreds of multinational corporations including, Philips, General Electric, Gulf, IBM, Sterling Airlines and Westinghouse.
  To honor his body of work, the prestigious Igor Ansoff Award was established in 1981 in the Netherlands. The award is given for research and management in the study of Strategic Planning and Management. The Japan Strategic Management Society has also established an annual award in his name and Vanderbilt University has established an Ansoff MBA scholarship. He was awarded five honorary doctorate degrees over the years.
  Igor retired from USIU two years before his death as a distinguished professor emeritus.
caption: Igor Ansoff, 1971
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