Featured Speakers

Margaret Elliott Tracy Collegiate
Professor in Business Administration
Professor of Management & Organizations

"I'm obsessed with moments of transformation — when someone says one thing that forever changes the outlook of others."

Areas of Interest:
Leadership, organizational change and effectiveness, Competing Values Framework

Bob Quinn is a co-founder and the current director of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. He has published 16 books on the subjects of leadership, organizational change, and effectiveness. He is well-known for his work on the Competing Values Framework, used by thousands of managers worldwide. He has thirty years of experience consulting with major corporations and government agencies.

Edward J. Frey Dean of the Ross School of Business
Stephen M. Ross Professor of Business

"In effective organizations, leadership exists at all levels — not just the top."

Areas of Interest:
Leadership and team development, experienced-based leadership, change adaptation

Scott DeRue conducts research and teaches in the areas of leadership and team development, with a particular focus on how leaders and teams learn, adapt, and develop in complex and dynamic environments. Reported by CNN Money and Poets & Quants to be one of the top 40 business school professors under the age of 40, he is featured regularly in top management journals and business publications.

Clinical Assistant Professor of
Management and Organizations

"What’s complicated and interesting about negotiating is that you’re simultaneously cooperating and competing."

Areas of Interest:
Strategic negotiations, conflict resolution, positive leadership, career fulfillment

Shirli Kopelman conducts extensive research and provides coaching on the strategic ways individuals can leverage emotions, cross-cultural differences, and power to co-create value in challenging circumstances, such as high-stakes negotiations. She is fascinated by how people negotiate meaning and co-create value in the context of multi-faceted complex social interactions in business settings.

Lecturer of Marketing and Strategy
Faculty Associate, Center for
Russian and East European Studies

"A 30,000-foot view? Have you ever looked from 30,000 feet? You can't see a thing."

Areas of Interest:
Global marketing, strategy, international business, emerging and transitional markets

John Branch brings extensive global marketing experience to the classroom to help his students better understand customers in today’s global business environment. He has worked closely with organizations large and small, including Coca-Cola, Ericsson, and Nestlé, providing guidance on key marketing initiatives. He has taught at more than 40 business schools throughout the world.

Associate Dean, Faculty and Research
Herrick Professor of Business
Professor of Technology and Operations
Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering

"Don't let the analytic side of management crowd out the human side."

Areas of Interest:
Management and operations, manufacturing and supply chain systems, innovation processes, healthcare systems

Wally Hopp is a former editor-in-chief of the journal Management Science and is currently a senior editor of Production and Operations Management. An active industry consultant, his clients have included Abbott Laboratories, Black & Decker, Boeing, Case, Dell, Ford, Eli Lilly, General Electric, General Motors, John Deere, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Whirlpool, Zenith, and others.

Associate Professor of Accounting

"You have to know when to pick up the pencil and get to work, but also when to put down the pencil and ponder the whole."

Areas of Interest:
Corporate accounting, financial organizational design, computer engineering

Venky Nagar serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Political Economy, The Accounding Review, and Journal of Management Accounting Research. He has contributed and garnered awards from many other publications, and has presented worldwide at institutions such as Harvard, LBS, and the American Accounting Association. His outside interests include art, architecture, and boxing. 

Associate Professor of Strategy

"Pop business books give sound, original advice. But the sound parts aren't original, and the original parts aren't sound."

Areas of Interest:
Strategies for growth, global competition, the role of business in society

Aneel Karnani studies how firms can leverage existing competitive advantages and create new ones to achieve rapid growth. He is interested in global competition, particularly in the context of emerging economies, and studies both how local companies can compete against large multinational firms and how multinational firms can succeed in these unfamiliar markets. 

Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow
Associate Professor of Accounting

"When asking big questions, don’t let external influences take over. Listen to yourself."

Areas of Interest:
Financial communication, case authoring, investor relations, public speaking

Gregory Miller’s research focuses on financial communication, or how managers communicate their view of the firm and its activities to outsiders. His work has been designed to understand both the results of effective communication and how effectiveness is achieved. Greg’s research has been published in top journals such as The Accounting Review and The Journal of Accounting Research.

The Jerome B. & Eilene M. York
Professor of Business Administration
Professor of Finance

"If you don’t take risks in investing, you’re guaranteed to lose."

Areas of Interest:
Backdating, asset pricing, insider trading, option pricing, managerial overconfidence

Nejat Seyhun's research focuses on backdating of executive options, risk return trade-off in asset prices, intraday impact of insider trading, long-run performance of IPOs, managerial overconfidence, option pricing, and conflict between information efficiency and rewards to information gathering. He has been cited in media, including The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Keith E. and Valerie J. Alessi
Professor of Business Administration
Professor of Management and Organizations

"The best ideas come not from your own area of expertise, but from outside."

Areas of Interest:
Positive organizing, organizational and individual flourishing, change management

Gretchen Spreitzer's research focuses on employee empowerment and leadership development, particularly within a context of organizational change and decline. Her most recent work is looking at positive deviance and how organizations enable employees to flourish. This work fits within a larger effort at Michigan Ross to develop a scholarship of positive organizing.