Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, a Professor of Organization Studies, and the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her pioneering research into how successful teams operate has highlighted the critical importance of managing outside, as well as inside, the team’s boundary. This research directly led to the concept of X-Teams as a vehicle for driving innovation within large organizations. Ancona’s work also focuses on the concept of distributed leadership and on the development of research-based tools, practices, and teaching/coaching models that enable organizations to foster creative leadership at every level.
She is the author of the book, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press) and the related articles, “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” and “Nimble Leadership: Walking the Line Between Creativity and Chaos” (Harvard Business Review). In addition to X-Teams, her studies of team performance have also been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the Sloan Management Review. Her previous book, Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing), centers on the skills and processes needed in today’s diverse and changing organization. Ancona has served as a consultant on leadership and innovation to companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bose, Takeda, Li & Fung, OCP, Accenture, ASA and has served on the Board of the Penn Graduate School of Education and a working group of the Canadian Council of Academies.
Ancona holds a BA and an MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management from Columbia University.

Alan Beebe is President of the American Chamber of Commerce in China based in Beijing. He has over twenty-five years of business experience in Asia, including seventeen years in mainland China.

As President, Alan oversees all advocacy, programs, partnerships and insights provided by the Chamber to support the business growth of nearly 900 foreign corporations operating in China, including most of the U.S. Fortune 500. He leads major advocacy initiatives related to trade tariffs, market access, cybersecurity, Made in China 2025, China’s NGO law and structural imbalances in U.S. – China trade and investment.

In 2018, he launched AmCham China’s Technology & Innovation Initiative, focused on the business and policy implications of disruptive digital technologies - such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and cloud computing – for U.S. companies in China.

Prior to joining AmCham China, Alan held various senior executive positions in China with EY, IBM, and management consulting firms AT Kearney and PRTM. He also led a Beijing based start-up for five years, the China Greentech Initiative, which merged in 2014 with the Paulson Institute, founded by Hank Paulson.

Alan has advised a wide range of corporations and global investors on investing and operating in China. His clients have included global private equity firms, high technology companies, energy related companies, and major state-owned and private Chinese enterprises.

He holds a Master’s degree from Yale University in International Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the U.S. He is a Board of Advisor of the Yale Club of Beijing and in that capacity promotes academic and cultural exchanges between the U.S. and China. He is a fluent speaker of mandarin Chinese, and reads and writes Chinese. Alan was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska.