Professor Nolan earned his B.A. from the University of Washington in Production and Operations Research in 1962, and his M.B.A and Ph.D. in 1963 and 1966, respectively. Upon graduation in 1966, he joined Boeing Commercial Airplane Company as an Information Technology manager in the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company 737 Program. In 1968, he joined the Harvard Business School as an Associate Professor and subsequently co-founded Nolan and Norton Information Technology Consulting Company (NNC) with then recent HBS Doctorate graduate David P. Norton, who became NNC President. After serving as Chairman of Nolan, Norton & Co. from 1977 - 1987, he returned to the faculty of Harvard Business School and became the Chaired William Barclay Harding Professor of Management of Technology.
In 2003, he became a Harvard University Professor Emeritus, and accepted an appointment at the University of Washington as the first Boeing Corporation Philip M. Condit Endowed Professor of Business Administration. In this capacity, he also was appointed to chair the Boeing AIMS 3-weel in-residence Executive Education Program. In 2009, he became an emeritus professor, at the University of Washington.
Professor Nolan has contributed more than a dozen Harvard Business Review articles on the management of information technology, including his article: “Board-level IT Oversight” co-authored with F. Warren McFarlan, (October-November 2007). He is the originator of the 'Stages Theory,' one of the most widely used management frameworks for information technology baselining and strategic planning.
He has authored and co-authored books, including Executive Team Leadership in the Global Economic and Competitive Environment a study of executive leadership of the Boeing Corporation published in 2015 as part of the “Routledge Studies in Leadership Research, the book, Adventures of an IT Leader by Robert Austin, Richard Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell published by the Harvard Business School Press and as an audio book by Amazon, which continues to be widely used in both undergraduate and graduate-level college courses on Information Technology (IT) leadership.
His current work is further described by a Harvard Business School Working Paper Paper 21-003 “Performance Hacking: The Contagious Practice that Corrodes Corporate Culture, Undermines Core Values, and Damages Great Companies” (co-authored with Professor Robert D. Austin, Ivey Business School). Professor Nolan continues his research on business transformation, through the process of creatively destroying industrial economy management principles and evolving a set of workable management principles for the information economy: some industrial economy management principles are obsolete, some salvageable, and entirely new principles are needed to guide the management of information as a resource distinctively different from scarce, physical resources. Central to his research is an understanding of information technology's information resource management role in taking an enterprise from “make and sell” to “sense and respond” strategies. Nolan (with Stephan Haeckel) discussed the key ideas behind leveraging general management decisions through information technology in a Harvard Business Review article, 'Managing by Wire (Haeckel, S. H., and R. L. Nolan. "Managing by Wire." Harvard Business Review 71, no. 5 (September–October 1993s.
[MultimediaColloquium] [IT, Business Strategy, &Public Policy] [Information Strategy and Reengineering]
[Video of Talk: 'The Exploding Interent: Impact on Business & Society']
