John Burrows

John Burrows is a senior lecturer in leadership at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, and an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Previously, he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

In these roles, Dr. Burrows teaches strategy, leadership, negotiations, decision-making, and organizational psychology to graduate students and senior executives in open enrollment and custom executive-education programs.

Before entering academia, Dr. Burrows held senior roles in sales and marketing at a number of enterprise software companies, including Siebel and Oracle, and was a partner with the consulting firm Accenture. In these roles, he negotiated, sold, and implemented complex, multi-national, multi-million-dollar projects around the globe.

Dr. Burrows also has significant experience in the public sector. A native of the United Kingdom, he came to the United States during his “gap year” to volunteer at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Project, in which role he claims notoriety for visiting every county seat in Mississippi, and Death Rows in two States (Mississippi and Florida). Later, while pursuing his undergraduate degree, he interned with other anti-death penalty groups as well as a Washington, D.C., based think tank, the Cato Institute. Then, as a senior consultant at Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Service, he also led business process re-engineering and IT strategy engagements with the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He also served as an advisor to Houses for Africa, a Cape Town-based organization seeking to close the affordable housing gap in line with urbanization to drive housing development in Africa.

Dr. Burrows currently serves on the advisory board of Profitable Ideas Exchange (PIE), which builds communities of senior executive to tackle many of the world’s greatest challenges and consults with clients across industries and geographies.