Robert Allio

Adjunct Professor of Engineering, Principal, Allio Associates

Biography

Robert Allio brings a wealth of leadership experience developed over a career as a senior executive, management consultant, author, and professor and dean of a business school. Allio helps students forge a personal model of leadership based on principles and practice revealed through contemporary management theory, history, literature, politics, and psychology. His students learn how leaders strengthen their relationships with followers by coalescing around a shared purpose, and establish a personal leadership identity that reconciles personal and organizational objectives and ethics.

As a strategy consultant, Allio advised clients in the US, Canada, Europe, India, and Latin America, including 3M, Allied Signal, Bell-South, Digital Equipment, FMC, GTE, New York Life, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Polaroid, USX, and many government agencies. He worked at Arthur D. Little as a management consultant, and held senior operating positions with Babcock & Wilcox, General Electric, Noranda Mines, and Westinghouse Electric. Allio was President of Canstar, a pioneer in the fiber optics industry, and served on the board of numerous private firms.

While dean of the School of Management, Allio founded the Incubator program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was a professor of management at Babson College, and has conducted leadership seminars for American Management Association, Business Week, and the Young Presidents’ Organization. His recent books on strategy and contemporary leadership theory are The Practical Strategist and The Seven Faces of Leadership.

Allio earned a PhD and BMetE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MSc from Ohio State University.