Meet the EMBA Faculty

Faculty teaching in the Ross Executive MBA Program all have significant experience in both our full- and part-time MBA programs, as well as Michigan's Executive Education program.  In classroom sessions and in projects, you will encounter respected researchers, vigorous scholars, successful consultants, and gifted, dedicated teachers.  These are people who enjoy teaching and do it extremely well, people who make themselves accessible for after-class consultations and devote long hours as advisors and as guides to student teams.
 

Business Economics Professor Jan Svejnar brings a different perspective into the classroom.  He recently ran for the presidency of the Czech Republic in early 2008, losing by a one-vote margin to incumbent President Vaclav Klaus.  He has taught the Economics of Business course in the EMBA Program.

Faculty teaching in the Executive MBA Program during the 2006-2008 academic years, listed alphabetically along with course(s) taught and area of specialization:

Gautam Ahuja

Advanced Competitive Analysis

Professor of Strategy
PhD, University of Michigan
Chair of Corporate Strategy and International Business; Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor; Hallman Faculty Fellow 
Current research interests focus on how firms use technology to gain and exploit competitive advantage.  His research has received several international awards, including the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.  Previous recipient of MBA and PhD Teaching Excellence Awards.

Eugene W. Anderson

Competing on Value

Professor of Marketing
PhD, University of Chicago
D. Maynard Phelps Collegiate Professor.
On the Editorial Board of the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Consumer Research.  Research focuses on business performance metrics, especially customer satisfaction.

Susan J. Ashford

Negotiations

Associate Dean for Leadership Programming and the Executive MBA Program; Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor of Business Administration, and Professor of Management and Organizations
PhD, Northwestern University
Current research includes managerial effectiveness, issue selling, self-management, and organizational change.  Has served as a consulting editor for the Academy of Management Journal and is currently a member of the editorial board at the Academy of Management Review.

Kim S. Cameron

Professional Development Program

Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
PhD, Yale University
Current research interest focuses on virtuousness in organizations such as forgiveness, humility and compassion and their relationships to success.  Is actively engaged in developing a new field in organizational studies entitled Positive Organizational Scholarship - the examination of extraordinarily positive dynamics in organizations and the factors that unleash the highest in human potential.

Jeffrey T. DeGraff

Professional Development Program

Clinical Associate Professor of Management Education
PhD, University of Wisconsin
Research and writing focus on innovation processes, creative thinking in business, change strategies, and organizational and leadership development.

Izak Duenyas

Managing the Value Chain, Supply Chain Management

John Psarathoukis Research Professor in Manufacturing Management; Professor of Operations Management
PhD, Northwestern University
Associate Editor of Management Science.  Tauber Manufacturing Institute Faculty Fellow. 
Research interests include supply chain coordination, pricing in competitive environments, and investments in new technology.

Simon Evenett

Competing Globally

Professor of International Trade and Economic Development, University of St. Gallen
PhD, Yale University
Director, Swiss Institute for International Economics and Applied Economic Research.  Research interests include international trade, economic development, and national and international competition policy.

Stacy Jackson

Leadership; Professional Development Program

Visiting Professor of Management and Organizations
PhD, Rice University
Research interests focus on value-driven organizational strategy, leadership development; business ethics; and power and politics in organizations.

Aneel Karnani

Competing on Resources; Strategies for Growth

Associate Professor of Strategy
DBA, Harvard University
Research interests include ways of gaining and exploiting competitive advantage, global competition, and manufacturing strategy.  Consultant or management educator for GenCorp, Volvo North America, GTE, Dow Corning, Dow (Japan), IBM, Holnam, GE, Philips, Swedish Match, DSM (Netherlands), Upjohn, Singapore Airlines, Singapore Technologies, Acer, Budd Company, Whirlpool, and General Motors.

Robert Kennedy

Management and Strategy in the Global Environment

Executive Director of the William Davidson Institute; Tom Lantos Professor of Business Administration
PhD, Harvard University
Research focuses on business strategy and industrial dynamics in emerging markets.

Thomas C. Kinnear

Strategic Marketing Planning

Eugene Applebaum Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and Professor of Marketing; Director Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies
PhD, University of Michigan
Current research activities includes entrepreneurship and high technology marketing.  Former Vice-President for Development, University of Michigan.

William N. Lanen

Management of Costs

Professor of Accounting
PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Chair of Accounting Department.  Research focuses on the development and use of accounting and performance measurement systems including systems in transitional economies and systems for environmental performance.  He also works on the analysis of financial disclosure issues and methodological issues in accounting research. Past recipient of the Victor L. Bernard Teaching Leadership Award.  

Andrew Lawlor

ExecMAP

Adjunct Professor of  Strategy, and Entrepreneurship; Director, Global MBA Projects for the Business School and William Davidson Institute; Director, Magna International Office of Entrepreneurial Studies
A faculty member at the business school for nearly 20 years, has led projects in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, South Africa, Taiwan, and China.

Margaret Levenstein

Macroeconomics

Adjunct Associate Professor of Business Economics; Executive Director, Michigan Census Research Data Center & Associate Research Scientist, Institute for Social Research. 
PhD, Yale University
Research focuses on the evolution of information systems and relationship with firm organization, historical changes in firm competition, information networks, contemporary international cartels, and the deisng of competition policies for a global economy.

Russell J. Lundholm

Financial Statement Analysis

Anderson Professor of Accounting
PhD, University of Iowa
Research focuses on financial statement analysis and equity valuation.

Len M. Middleton

ExecMAP

Lecturer of Strategy; Lecturer of Entrepreneurship; Co-Director of Global MBA Projects
Extensive experience in consulting covering corporate strategy issues for senior management, strategic manufacturing issues, and the development and funding of high-tech startup companies. Interests include entrepreneurship and family business activities.

M.P. Narayanan

Managing Capital and Value; Strategies for Growth

Professor of Finance
PhD, Northwestern University
Chair of Finance Department.  Research interests include Contract Theory, Asymmetric Information, and their application to Corporate Finance and Investments.  Issues in Capital Structure, Takeover Financing and Divestitures, Managerial Myopia, Decision Horizon, Managerial Incentives, and Mutual Fund Structure.

C.K. Prahalad

Professional Development Program

Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration; Professor of Strategy
D.B.A, Harvard University
C. K. Prahalad is a globally known figure and has consulted with the top management of many of the world’s foremost companies. His research specializes in corporate strategy and the role and value added of top management in large, diversified, multinational corporations.

Cindy A. Schipani

Corporate Governance

Professor of Business Law; Merwin H. Waterman Collegiate Professor; Chair, Law, History, and Communication
JD, University of Chicago
Primary research interests are in the area of corporate governance, with a focus on the relationship among directors, officers, shareholders and other stakeholders.  Previous recipient of research awards, including the Academy of Legal Studies in Business National Award for Excellence and its Holmes-Cardozo Research Award.  

H. Nejat Seyhun

Corporate Financial Strategy

The Jerome B. & Eilene M. York Professor of Business Administration; Professor of Finance
Professor Seyhun’s current research activity focuses on risk-return trade-off in asset prices, intra-day impact of insider trading, long-run performance of IPOs, managerial overconfidence, Chinese walls and conflicts of interests in securities firms, option pricing, and conflict between information efficiency and rewards to information gathering.

George J. Siedel

Legal Environment of Business

Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration
Diploma in Comparative Legal Studies, Cambridge University
JD, University of Michigan
Admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court and in Michigan, Ohio, and Florida.  Chief Editor of the Michigan Real Property Review and served as staff and special editor of the American Business Law Journal.  

Valerie Y. Suslow

Economics of Business

Associate Dean for Degree Program; Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy
PhD, Stanford University
Research focuses primarily on international cartel behavior and the implications for global antitrust policy.  Interests also include pricing of pharmaceutical goods.  Recipient of the Victor L. Bernard Teaching Leadership Award in 2004.  Consultant on merger and price-fixing cases.

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Leading Organizational Change

Professor of Management and Organizations
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Associate Dean for Faculty Development; Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor.
Primary research is devoted to understanding the fundamental mechanisms of organizational adaptation, reliability, and resilience. One stream of research focuses on how top executive team composition, cognition, and learning influence a firm's adaptability and performance. A second stream of work focuses on processes associated with team and organizational resilience, high-reliability organizing, and investigation of the social and organizational underpinnings of medical mishaps, with the explicit goal of understanding how an organization's design contributes to its member's ability to successfully manage unexpected events.

David W. Wright

Evaluating Financial Performance

Associate Professor of Accounting
PhD, Michigan State University
Research interests include corporate governance determinants of the quality of financial reporting, the role of off-balance sheet lease financing in economic decisions, the determinants of management compensation decisions, and the ability of experts to outperform or influence the market.