Mark Lipton coaches CEOs and C-suite leaders to build organizations that outperform their competitors—not through management fads, but through empirically-proven practices rooted in four decades of leadership research.

Named among the World's Top 30 Management Professionals (2024, 2025), Mark led Deloitte's Chief Executive Program research strategy from 2015 to 2022, analyzing what separates high-performing leadership teams from the rest. His client roster spans Fortune 500 companies, transformative tech startups, and mission-critical nonprofits—all seeking the same thing: growth grounded in evidence, not guesswork.

Mark's signature expertise is organizational vision—specifically, how CEOs and board chairs articulate "vision stories" that fuel growth and alignment. His book Guiding Growth: How Vision Keeps Companies on Course (Harvard Business School Press, 2003) remains the definitive guide for leaders navigating strategic clarity, and it has been translated into multiple languages and adopted worldwide.

His 2017 book Mean Men: The Perversion of America's Self-Made Man won three national awards for its unflinching analysis of toxic leadership and the cultural myths that enable it—work that informs his approach to building psychologically healthy, high-performing executive teams.

Mark's research on the "Founders' Dilemma"—how legacy leaders struggle to separate identity from role—shapes his non-profit board leadership and organization change work. He co-chairs Footsteps (a human rights organization) and serves on the board of The Elizabeth Freeman Center (domestic violence and sexual abuse), applying the same evidence-based frameworks that guide his corporate consulting.

A Professor Emeritus at Parsons School of Design and The New School, Mark has published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Journal of Management Consulting. He earned his Ph.D. from UMass Amherst and served as an Erik Erikson Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the Austen Riggs Center.

Whether you're a CEO navigating hypergrowth, a board chair seeking strategic clarity and more effective governance, or a founder wrestling with succession, Mark brings the same discipline: rigorous research, actionable insight, and frameworks proven to work when the stakes are highest.

  • Mark’s diverse entrepreneurial client base includes founders of transformative start-ups in technology, manufacturing, media, education, health care, finance, and marketing. His coaching skills and leadership development programs are engaged by C-level executives across all sectors of the economy, and his development of corporate and nonprofit boards allows them to govern more effectively. In the not-for-profit realm, he has consulted to and led leadership development initiatives for organizations ranging from multibillion-dollar philanthropic game-changers to local community-based social service providers to the world’s largest international NGOs. Much of his work to infuse progressive leadership practices into the NGO and not-for-profit world has been made possible by significant grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, Mott, and Charles H. Revson Foundations, among others.

    A leading authority on Founders’ Dilemma, the strong and often dysfunctional psychological forces that organizational founders experience when they are pressured to step down, Mark has further advanced effective strategies for CEO transitions in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. He continues to serve as a commentator on CEO personality and behavior across all media platforms.

  • Mark is co-chair of the board of Footsteps, (human rights and social services) in New York. He serves on the board of The Elizabeth Freeman Center (domestic violence and sexual abuse), applying the same evidence-based frameworks that guide his corporate consulting.