Prof. Leavitt holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College, an MSc From Brown University, and a PhD from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University before coming to Stanford. He has also taught at the London Business School and at INSEAD in France.

Dr. Leavitt's most recent book is Top Down: Why Hierarchies are Here to Stay and How to Manage them More Effectively, (Harvard Business School Press, 2005.) He is also author of Managerial Psychology, now in its fifth edition and eighteenth language, Corporate Pathfinders, Hot Groups (with Jean Lipman-Blumen), and other books. His writings have appeared in The Harvard Business Review, The Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, and a number of other professional journals.

For several years, Professor Leavitt served as director of the Stanford Executive Program. He was also the first director of the Stanford-NUS Executive Program in Singapore, as well as educational advisor to Thailand's Institute for Management Education. He has consulted with many organizations, including Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Ford Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Varian Associates, and the Straits Times Press of Singapore. He is on the Advisory Boards of USC's Leadership Institute, Helsinki University of Technology's Euro-MBA Program, and The Institute for Advanced Studies in Leadership at Claremont Graduate University.

His interests include the functioning of small groups, communication networks, styles of thinking, management education, and the problems and pitfalls of accelerating technology.