Professor of Strategic Management at MIT

Michael L. Joroff's work focuses on strategic planning for organisations in transition and in using the physical environment to drive and support that change. He is currently exploring how the physical environment converges with cyberspace to influence how and where work and learning are accomplished in the office, home and the community.

He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with which he has been affiliated since 1971. From 1978 - 1995 he directed MIT's Laboratory of Architecture and Planning which did groundbreaking work in the fields of energy management, environmental policy, urban design, housing technology and the management of corporate real estate. The Laboratory had extensive research collaborations with industry in East Asia as well as in the United States and Europe.

Mr. Joroff's current research explores how corporations use their location and workplaces for strategic advantage. He has co-authored several major reports on the subject, including for IDRC's CRE 2000 Programme: Reinventing the Workplace, Managing the Reinvented Workplace, Team Space, Manufacturing and the Lean Real Estate Portfolio. He was a founder and the research director for the programme. He recently published Excellence by Design, Transforming the Workplace and Work Practice, co-authored with MIT colleagues. For IDRC and a consortium of corporations, he now directs a study of corporate strategy to integrate physical, information technology and human resource assets to support core business processes. He directs professional education programmes for urban planners and corporate real estate executives in the United States, Europe and Japan, and is a core faculty member of the Institute of Corporate Real Estate.

Current projects include the development of a large-scale telecom R&D community in the Boston region; development of an electronically connected, 'extended' workplace in several of the US's Rocky Mountain rural states; and development of home-based and community support systems for free agent, independent workers in Japan.

For the past twenty years Mr. Joroff has been extensively involved with projects of technology transfer in the fields of real estate management, housing and urban development between the United States and Japan.

He is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Universities.