The paper "Quantity Flexibility Contracts and Supply Chain Performance" by Professor Bill Lovejoy and his colleague, Andy Tsay from Santa Clara University, was published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management in 1999. The paper delves into the concept of quantity flexibility in supply chain contracts and its potential to deal with demand uncertainties. This influential work formally captured the practice of “funneling” variability over time, whereby more variability is tolerated in earlier planning phases and less tolerated over time as the delivery date approaches. This paper has specifically led to further studies on the optimal design and effectiveness of supply chain contracts, enhancing the field’s understanding of tactical and strategic issues in supply chain management. Researchers have built on Tsay and Lovejoy's model to study the application of QF contracts in different industrial contexts and their interactions with various supply chain configurations. The concept and modeling presented in this paper have become a prominent part of the academic discourse on supply chain coordination, influencing subsequent studies in inventory management, order variability, and supply chain profitability. Thus, the paper's impact is significant and broad, inspiring much-needed research on flexible, cooperative strategies for supply chain optimization.

Originally developed by Professors Gretchen Spreitzer, Bob Quinn, Jane Dutton, and Laura Morgan Roberts through their research at the Center for Positive Organizations, the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ is a personal development tool that helps you to see who you are at your best, engaging you to live and work from this powerful place daily. Since its launch, the RBSE has helped thousands of executives, managers, employees, and students discover new potential. Unlike most other feedback tools, the RBSE isn't limited to self-assessment. It invites people from your life and works to share stories of moments they feel they've seen you at your best, surfacing what few of us become aware of otherwise. The RBSE enables you to gain insight into how your unique talents have positively impacted others and gives you the opportunity to further leverage your strengths at work and in life.

The Carson Scholars Program at Michigan Ross is a signature feature of the Ross BBA Program and a result of the vision and generosity of David Carson, BBA '55. Carson, the former president of People's Savings Bank in Connecticut, was recognized by Forbes as one of the 500 most powerful people in the corporate United States. Based on his experiences throughout his career, Carson realized that future business leaders should understand how government works to develop effective corporate strategies for participating in the public policy arena. As a result, CSP enables Ross undergraduates to augment their on-campus learning with study in Washington, D.C., where they meet with elected officials, government experts, industry leaders, issue advocates, and lobbyists. Since its foundation in 2005, the program has enabled more than 1,000 alumni to learn about the public policy process from these experts.

In 2006, Professor Sue Ashford, associate dean for leadership programming, founded the Ross Leadership Initiative, which was the precursor to the Sanger Leadership Center and one of the first organized leadership programs among business schools worldwide. The initiative was influenced by Ashford's research on learning leadership via experience and Professor Noel Tichy's action-based learning concepts. Suddenly students were not just learning about leadership but were actually engaged in doing it. Prominent among these efforts was the highly influential Leadership Crisis Challenge, which puts students in the hot seat needing to resolve a crisis in the moment. This program was recognized with the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize in 2011 and remains a prominent and popular program in the school to this day. Later, under the leadership of Professors Scott DeRue and Gretchen Spreitzer, RLI grew and launched new programs that persist today, including Story Lab, the Ross Leaders Academy, and more. In 2015, alum Stephen W. Sanger, MBA '70, and Karen Sanger made a defining gift of $20 million to establish the Sanger Leadership Center. With the Sangers' gift, the Sanger Leadership Center, now under the leadership of Professor Lindy Greer, has created an array of custom programs and workshops and now offers leadership development programs for students across the university.

The article "Social Distancing as a Control Mechanism" by Professor James Westphal, is part of a larger stream of research that developed a more sociological perspective on corporate leadership and governance, an area of scholarship that had been largely dominated by economic perspectives into the 1990s. In a series of studies, Westphal and colleagues revealed a collection of social and psychological mechanisms by which governance policies, structures, and practices that were assumed to promote the economic interests of shareholders and other stakeholders were frequently subverted in ways that served the interests of powerful corporate elites. One such mechanism was "social distancing," a social sanction in which corporate directors who participated in governance reforms that threatened to increase board control over top management at one firm were socially isolated and even ostracized at other firms where they served on the board. They were less likely to be invited to informal meetings, and other directors were less likely to build on their comments and suggestions or solicit their opinions on strategic issues in formal board meetings. Directors who experienced social distancing, witnessed it firsthand, or were socially connected to a director who experienced it, were less likely to participate subsequently in elite-threatening actions. In that sense, the social distancing that Westphal identified parallels and anticipates the social distancing that we all learned about and practiced during the COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike social distancing during a pandemic, social distancing in corporate leadership, like the other social and psychological mechanisms that the authors uncovered, helped maintain a system that serves the interests of a powerful few rather than the many who depend on it for employment, goods and services, and wealth creation.

Professor Karl Weick was an iconic founder of the field of organizational behavior. Starting with his seminal book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, which was published in 1969, Weick's ideas had enormous influence, shaping organizational scholarship over the next decades and to this day. He focused on the processes of organizing rather than on organizations per se, suggesting that the insights into those processes give us important leverage to both understand and affect life in organizations. In his book, he introduced the seminal concept of "sense-making," which he defined as "the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing." Weick's ongoing research focused on how individuals engaged in making meaning and how that meaning-making affected important outcomes in organizations. His book has been cited more than 35,000 times, and his other work on the topic has been cited more than 13,000 times. His pioneering work has instilled a highly influential perspective on the people attempting the organizing work that goes into organizations.

Professor Jim Walsh played a significant role in the development of work on individual, group, and collective cognition in organizations. Interested in managerial mistakes, Walsh wanted to know if executives’ worldviews could blind them to their decision environments. He was also interested in learning how the cognitive capabilities of both leadership teams and the organization itself could be harnessed for the good of organizations. In a 1988 Academy of Management Journal article, Walsh traced how these belief structures might or might not blind executives to their decision environments. He also considered how these belief structures may or may not combine to shape team decision-making. Therefore, he wrote a theoretical paper about these possibilities, which was published in the Journal of Management in 1986. He followed up that article with an empirical effort to measure and trace the impact of “negotiated belief structures” on decision-making (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes published his findings in 1988). His thoughts then turned to the organization as a whole. He wrote a seminal paper on organizational memory, one that identified the nature of information selection, retention, and retrieval processes in organizations – for the good or ill of those organizations. That work was published in the Academy of Management Review in 1991. When interest in cognition in organizations started to grow, Walsh became a founding officer of the Academy of Management’s Managerial and Organizational Cognition Interest Group in 1990 and helped to lead that pioneering group of scholars for the first three years of its existence. Tying all of the insights and experiences together, he wrote what became something of a field-defining scholarly paper in 1995. Titled “Managerial Organizational Cognition: Notes from a Trip Down Memory Lane,” it was published in Organization Science. Today the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management is home to more than 1,200 scholars worldwide. Citing his foundational scholarship and early leadership, the Division honored Jim with its Distinguished Scholar Award in 2020.

In the early 2000s, Professors Tim Fort and Cindy Schipani held the first conference on the role of business in promoting peace. The conference was attended by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and brought together individuals from academia, business, and government to discuss efforts that could be made to reduce violence in the world. It was concluded that there is a role of business, especially in serving as an unofficial ambassador or role model when conducting business internationally. This event set in motion the beginnings of a new research paradigm on "Peace Through Commerce."

The fields of social movements and organizations had very little overlap until Professors Jerry Davis and Mayer Zald convened a pair of conferences at Michigan Ross in 2001 and 2002 that brought together top scholars from both domains and forged research collaborations that yielded a 2005 Cambridge University Press volume and a 2008 special issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. Zald had previously published a piece on the topic in 1977, as had Davis in 1994. Today, this is a widely recognized and fruitful research domain that arose just in time to explain the increasingly prevalent interplay between corporations and social movements, including boycotts, corporate political activism, and employee social movements.

In 1985, Professor M.P. Narayanan published a paper on managers' proclivity to focus on the short- rather than the long-term. His paper is a rigorous and theoretical explanation that requires the manager to have private information. Narayanan shows that the manager's proclivity to focus on the short-term is more evident in a less experienced manager but is attenuated if the business's riskiness and the contract's length increase. While singling out the importance of the short- and long-term conflict as the basis for the myopic behavior of firms may be a challenge, this phenomenon is ever-present.

In 1998, Professor David Hirshleifer of the Michigan Business School, and two co-authors, published a paper titled "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions." This paper has been widely recognized as the first explanation of the seemingly contradictory behavior in asset prices (under- and overreactions to different news) based on two well documented behavioral biases. The biases outlined in the paper are overconfidence (regarding the precision of one's private information) and biased self-attribution. The former leads to well documented evidence of long-term overreaction (price reversals), while the latter causes underreaction (momentum) in the medium term. This paper was the first widely recognized paper in finance based on departures from rational behavior and provided a compelling explanation for seemingly anomalous behavior in asset prices.

In 2002, Professor Ravi Anupindi and his co-authors published the influential paper "Coordination and Flexibility in Supply Contracts with Options" in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. This work introduced an innovative model that integrated options into supply contracts, offering enhanced management of demand uncertainties in supply chains. The research highlighted the important potential role of options in attaining contractual flexibility to coordinate supply chain participants and improve overall efficiency. The paper influenced subsequent research on supply contract design and demand management, one of the major areas of supply chain management research in the past two decades.

Professor Jim Walsh was elected as the 65th president of the Academy of Management in 2006, making him only the second Michigan faculty member to lead the Academy. Walsh took stock of the approximately 16,000 members who lived in more than 100 countries at the time and noted that very few of them resided on the continent of Africa. Knowing that Africa, the cradle of civilization, is home to over a billion people and more than 1,000 universities and that the continent was poised for enormous population and economic growth, he wanted to bridge the gap and reach out to the teacher-scholars on the continent. Fully aware of the terrible history of colonization, he decided to simply create space for colleagues in Africa to meet their colleagues from the rest of the world. The first step in the process was to work with others to co-found the African Academy of Management. His continued work culminated in a 2013 AOM Africa Conference, in which approximately 300 colleagues from the world over journeyed to Johannesburg to share and imagine new research and teaching ideas. Since that time, the Africa Academy of Management has hosted a number of faculty development workshops, launched the Africa Journal of Management, and held conferences across the continent. In short, Africa-centered scholarship has burgeoned. Beyond that, the Ross School was just granted affiliate member status in the Association of African Business Schools. Professor Walsh wanted to be sure that we too are a part of the emerging scholarly conversations and evolving business practices on the continent.

In her research published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, Health Affairs, and other outlets, Professor Sarah Miller has used quasi-experimental methods to evaluate whether receiving improved access to health care in utero, in early childhood, and throughout childhood improves outcomes in adulthood. Miller and her co-authors have found that children who have received eligibility for health insurance through the Medicaid program have improved outcomes on a number of dimensions, both in terms of health and economic outcomes. Additionally, they found that the children of those children who had better access to healthcare in childhood were healthier at birth. This suggests a cycle in which investing in children's health today can have multigenerational benefits that allow the government to fully recoup the cost of its initial investment in the form of higher tax payments and lower spending on welfare programs. Miller's research has been discussed in numerous high-profile news outlets and has strongly impacted how academics and policymakers view investments in children. Furthermore, her papers have been cited nearly 500 times.

The research of Assistant Professor Eric Zou began with the observation that regulatory monitoring of pollution is often spatially sparse, temporally intermittent, or even nonexistent in developing-country settings. In a pair of papers titled "Unwatched Pollution: The Effect of Intermittent Monitoring on Air Quality" and "What's Missing in Environmental (Self-)Monitoring: Evidence from Strategic Shutdown of Pollution Monitors," Zou and his co-authors studied the strategic interaction between pollution monitoring and air quality. 

These two papers demonstrate that intermittency in regulatory monitoring causally affects pollution outcomes and vice versa -- high pollution can induce selective monitoring. The evidence highlights a general principle-agent challenge of environmental federalism: local agencies are in charge of self-monitoring and enforcing federal environmental standards. 

At the same time, these local agencies bear the regulatory penalties if their own data suggest that violations occurred. In a third paper titled "From Fog to Smog: The Value of Pollution Information," Zou and his co-authors found that pollution information disclosure triggered a dramatic change in public awareness of pollution issues, which in turn translated to increased avoidance behavior among members of the public and improved health. 

This paper is among the first to document social, behavioral, and health changes when a highly polluted country without publicly available pollution information transitions to a new regime that makes it possible to openly discuss pollution issues and to find and use pollution information in real time.

Sensory marketing is a relatively new and growing field of marketing that Professor Aradhna Krishna pioneered in the early 2000s. Krishna saw that there were disparate fields of study on senses, but there was no cohesion between these fields. She brought all these sub-fields together under the umbrella of sensory marketing and organized the first conference on it in 2008. She then wrote two books and dozens of scholarly articles on the subject to make the field grow. And the field did grow both in academia and in practice -- enough for Harvard Business Review to do a lead Ideawatch article on it featuring Krishna as the world's foremost expert on the topic. Krishna has defined "sensory marketing" as marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment, and behavior. Krishna continues to publish important, scholarly articles on the topic. She also started the Sensory Marketing Lab at Michigan Ross, which attracts PhD students and post-docs from around the world.