Meet Suzy Welch

An award-winning NYU Stern School of Business professor, tech entrepreneur, and three-time New York Times best-selling author, Suzy Welch is known for imparting warmth and wisdom about business and culture, captivating an enthusiastic and expanding audience.

Over the course of her multifaceted 40-year career, Professor Welch has been a crime reporter in Miami, a consultant at Bain & Co., and a columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Business School, she has been (and remains) a contributor to the Today Show and an op-ed contributor to the Wall Street Journal. But Professor Welch’s greatest passion is in the classroom at NYU Stern School of Business, where she teaches two acclaimed classes, “Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need,” and “Managing with Purpose.” Professor Welch is also the director of the NYU | Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing, a community of management scholars and practitioners committed to advancing the discovery of authentic meaning.

Professor Welch was born in Portland, Oregon in 1959. She began her career as a crime reporter for The Miami Herald in 1981, after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University. After a serendipitous reassignment to the business beat some years later, she left daily journalism to attend Harvard Business School, where she graduated as a Baker Scholar. The next seven years were spent at Bain & Company, as a consultant working with manufacturing clients in the Midwest.

In 1995, Professor Welch combined her two career paths at the Harvard Business Review. In her years at HBR, eventually as the publication’s Editor, she conceptualized and edited articles on strategy, operations, and organizational behavior, and wrote others on leadership, change, and crisis management. With her late husband, Jack Welch, Professor Welch is the author of two international bestsellers, Winning, in 2005, and The Real-Life MBA, in 2015. On her own, she is the author of the 2008-2009 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea, a decision-making concept she originally wrote about as a columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine.

Professor Welch’s newest book, Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career, will be published in May 2025.

After her husband’s passing in 2020, Professor Welch joined the faculty of NYU Stern School of Business as a clinical professor of management practice. One of her classes, “Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need” is an interactive self-discovery methodology that helps students discover and live into their authentic purpose. She also teaches “Managing with Purpose,” a survey of the many skills and competencies leaders must hone to be beloved by their teams, customers, and communities. Also at Stern, Professor Welch’s research into values formation and discovery eventually led to the creation of a suite of psychometric tools, designed to help individuals discover the gap between their lived experience and the full expression of their values.

Professor Welch serves on the board of the publicly traded home services giant, ANGI, and Humane World for Animals. She is an active supporter of the Good Food Institute, an alternative proteins think tank, and The Central Park Conservancy. She has a large family, including the most perfect grandchildren in the history of humanity, and lots of dogs. She lives in New York.