Strategic Management (MGMT 478)

We don’t just learn the concepts in my class, we apply them to unique and interesting real-world examples. When you’re in my class, you do not just come to listen to me lecture; you come to take part and share your thoughts in a very interactive and often lively discussion about important issues and decisions facing organizations that I am confident will be interesting to you. And if you don’t like my examples, you get to study whatever organization you’d like for your final team project.

Managerial decision-making is a mixed bag. I try to figure out why executives make the decisions that they make and how various stakeholders respond to those decisions, both positively and negatively. My work studies the influence of executives’ personal characteristics and compensation, in decision contexts ranging from product recalls to acquisitions, and assesses how markets, customers, and the media respond.

My research directly connects the motivating factors of executive decisions (e.g., incentives and pay structure) to important bottom-line outcomes for companies. This research helps executives understand how they are influenced and potentially biased by their personal backgrounds, key relationships, or pay packages and what impact those factors have on the company’s financial performance and the perceptions of its stakeholders.

Some of my current studies include: how managerial explanations of their company’s product recalls affect customer reactions, how new venture team experience profiles affect their ability to secure funding, and how executives’ cognitive styles affect their capacity to successfully complete the complex acquisition process.

Students that help me on projects ‘research’ in a sense that all of us can understand – scouring the internet to collect the best information out there – often to assemble collections of news stories, press releases or other documents that chronicle what organizations have done and how those actions are covered in the media. This always requires a certain degree of problem-solving and attention-to-detail and should serve any student well in any line of work, in research or otherwise.

There’s a natural energy on a campus like ours, which motivates me to give my very best for my students and to keep up with the great faculty surrounding me. We’re all studying interesting, important topics at the Moore School that have a tremendous impact on society. I really want to do my part to answer some of those crucial questions in my research and help prepare my students to take on those questions once they graduate.

Date nights with my wife, traveling coast to coast to see friends and family, keeping up with my dogs Opus and Cedar, basketball, bowling, watching my Cubbies and all Notre Dame sports