Teaching and Research Interests

Teaching: Organizational Behavior, Strategy, Organizational Design, Ethics and Social Responsibility, International Management.

Research Interests: Learning and learning assessment, Cross-cultural values, Skill transfer for mciro-entrepreneurs, Individual values and ethics related decisions

Teaching Philosophy

I teach experientially in the broadest sense of the word. I teach skills and thinking skills. I do not believe people learn from someone else’s presentation but they learn from their own thinking and doing. Therefore in many of my courses, students are asked to spend large amounts of time, energy, and thought learning by doing, deciding, analyzing, and thinking. They are asked to spend little remembering what I say and feeding it back to me in the form of tests. I do not give multiple-choice tests. That’s not the way people are assessed in the real world.

Behavior Courses. In my behavior courses, I require students to be in ongoing groups or teams, undertake graded projects as a team just as they would do in departments in organizations. Individuals then will need to make choices about how much to participate and in what direction to influence, and their grades will depend in part how much they understand the causes and consequences of their choices. They will also be graded on the quality of analysis of how the group turned out as it did. I also ask students to analyze cases in my behavior classes

Core Strategy Classes. In both my capstone strategy courses (one graduate and one undergraduate), I ask students to play a computerized total enterprise simulation. In the simulation, students run a business making multiple marketing, operations, and finance decisions (such as how much to produce, how much to spend on quality improvements, how much to borrow, what kind of marketing research to do). Grades depend in part on how much money players make and in part on how well they understand why they did as well or poorly on the game. . I also ask students to analyze cases in my strategy classes.

Strategic Theory, Organizational Design, Social Responsibility Classes. In the majority of my non-behavior, non-simulation classes, I teach from primary sources (articles and cases); I do not use a text took. Text-books describe, and I do not want students to remember descriptions. My goal is for students to think, and the sources I use provoke learners to analyze, apply, and form opinions rather than just to take in information. Most of the material I assign is aimed at business practitioners rather than academics, so it is not highly theoretical. I intend this material to be recently developed and often controversial. I ask students try to understand how the article applies in the real world and how valuable it is. I don’t require them to agree with the intent of the articles.

Participation. I believe that my responsibility in a classroom is to develop a structure for learning and to provide materials to stimulate. I also believe that the instructor is in part responsible for classroom atmosphere in that he or she should help stimulate and be encouraging and open rather than critical. I believe that some of the responsibility for the atmosphere of the classroom, however, belongs to students. I want students to be open and willing to share experiences and opinions and prepare enough to understand assigned material. Therefore, I grade participation. I try not to penalize naturally shy people, though. I allow students to turn in papers to prove they have prepared for class.