About the Event
Some of the most consequential things that happen at work never appear on the org chart. They run through relationships: who trusts whom, who brings whom into the room, who hears about the opportunity first. Social capital, the trust and goodwill that accumulate through those relationships, is one of the most powerful and least managed assets in organizational life.
John Burrows, Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and co-author of Social Capital at Work (Simon & Schuster, November 2026), joins us for a conversation about how relationships actually create advantage: in the boardroom, on a volunteer board, and across a professional network. We will look at what the research says about which relationships matter, why the most valuable ones are usually not the closest ones, and what it takes to build a network deliberately rather than by accident.
Who's Speaking
John Burrows
John Burrows, PhD, has spent his career inside one question: how organizations actually work, not on the org chart but in reality. He began as a consultant at Arthur Andersen, moved into enterprise software at Siebel and Oracle, and became a consulting partner at Accenture before crossing over to the...
John Burrows, PhD, has spent his career inside one question: how organizations actually work, not on the org chart but in reality. He began as a consultant at Arthur Andersen, moved into enterprise software at Siebel and Oracle, and became a consulting partner at Accenture before crossing over to the academy. He is Senior Lecturer and Academic Director for Leadership and Part-Time Programs at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, teaches negotiations at Chicago Booth, and is an Associate Fellow at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He has taught and advised leaders at organizations as varied as Kiewit, State Farm, KPMG, eBay, the American College of Surgeons, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Social Capital at Work, written with sociologist Seth Rachlin, publishes with Simon & Schuster on November 10.