Faculty: Business Communication

Jolanta Aritz specializes in intercultural business communication, small-group decision-making, leadership communication and virtual teams. Professor Aritz is co-author of the book Leadership Talk: A Discourse Approach to Leader Emergence and co-editor of the Discourse Perspectives on Organizational Communication book. She serves as Vice-president for the Western region of the Association of Business Communication. Prof. Aritz is a former Fulbright scholar and recipient of multiple awards, including the Distinguished Publication on Business Communication, the USC Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching, and the Mellon mentoring award.

Pete Cardon teaches a variety of business communication courses. He researches team communication, role of technology in leadership communication, and intercultural business communication. Professor Cardon previously served as President of the Association of Business Communication. Pete previously taught at the University of South Carolina for six years and Utah State University for three years. Before working in higher education, he held several marketing and management positions in the tourism and manufacturing industries. He is the author of Business Communication: Developing Leaders for a Networked World and co-author of Business and Professional Communication: Putting People First.

Lee is an expert in rhetoric who has taught both of our main undergraduate courses, BUAD 302 and WRIT 340, and has coordinated our series of communication classes for doctoral students. Lee’s classes are noted for revolving around books and other readings on current issues that change year-to-year, such as the industrial food system, the water crisis in the United States, the financial crisis, and most recently the debt ceiling crisis. Lee has also become one of Marshall’s leaders in ethics instruction. He developed and for several years taught ethics seminars in various accounting courses, and worked on the revision of Marshall’s Ethics and Professional Communication undergraduate elective. Lee has made numerous service contributions over the years, including serving as a faculty advisor in various student case competitions.

Maria Colman is the owner and founder of handmadeMaria®. The original business plan was part of her MBA at the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business. Maria has over 30 years' experience in retail marketing, accounting management, direct sales, and education. Her upcycled products and art pieces are sold at brick and mortar and online stores.

Courses taught include; BUAD 302, BUAD 302T, WRIT 340, GSBA 542, and GSBA 523T—core courses for undergraduate and graduate students.

Her commitment to her students surpasses teaching—she also coaches undergraduate student teams for case competitions as an advisor for the Marshall Case Team and accompanies them to competitions.

Cesar Armendariz is an executive leader and educator with more than two decades of experience at the intersection of strategic communications, public narrative, healthcare, and systems change across California. His work focuses on advancing health and racial equity by aligning institutional strategy, community voice, and equity-centered storytelling to build trust, influence policy, and strengthen outcomes in complex environments.  His insightful leadership has supported the development of community health worker networks, behavioral health navigation models, rural health strategies, and large-scale food access initiatives designed to elevate community power and improve population health.

In parallel with his executive career, Cesar has served for more than fifteen years as an adjunct professor of Business Communications at the University of Southern California. In his teaching, he emphasizes strategic communication, ethical leadership, equity, emotional intelligence, and servant leadership. He is also actively engaged in nonprofit board service focused on homelessness prevention and community wellbeing. He is bilingual (Spanish), bicultural (Latin American protocol), and enjoys traveling and spending his free time with his beautiful wife and five children.

Kevin is a Manager of the Acquisition Planning and Compliance Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He completed his doctorate in Organizational Leadership at Pepperdine University. He received an MBA from the University of Redlands, is a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) and is fluent in Italian. Kevin has over 25 years of business experience including diplomatic missions for the United Nations. Additionally, Kevin is a professor in the University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business and has published several articles on leadership.

MBA, USC 2020
MA in Leadership, Vanguard University 1997

Jason Frenn is a world-wide conference speaker and author who has spoken to over 8 million people in live events since 1996. He founded Power To Change, a non-profit organization that aims to help those who are disenfranchised in Latin America. Jason hosts Poder Para Cambiar on Radio Nueva Vida with a listening audience of over 1 million. He is a voice of influence throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

He has vast experience consulting organizations helping them to constructively navigate organizational change, leadership, motivation, and persuasion. He is the co-founder and the primary instructor of the Ziglar Speakers Institute.

Doug Andrews specializes in accounting-environment communication issues, writes about those issues in accounting journals, and helps corporate clients (IBM, KPMG, PwC, Exxon, Deloitte, Chevron, GE, Mars, SEIU) and smaller firms. His teaching, research, and consulting sensibilities are tempered by a range of experiences: two and a half years as Associate Dean of Marshall's undergraduate business program, 17 years as department chair, 30+ years of classroom teaching, four Vietnam-era years in Special Forces, four years as a truck driver and bowler, three summers on a Midwestern crop harvesting team, eight years as a sales specialist for a publisher, and a PhD from Northwestern.

Sandra Chrystal serves as Vice Dean for online learning and oversees Marshall's Centers of Excellence. She previously served as Director of the Center for Management Communication. She teaches management communication classes focused on technology-enhanced and community-based learning. She has received USC's Teaching with Technology and Teaching Has No Boundaries awards, and the Marshall School's Evan C. Thompson Teaching and Learning Innovation award and MSB's Dean's Award for Community. Before joining USC, she taught at Clayton State University, Georgia Tech, and Notre Dame, worked in corporate marketing, and owned her own business.

Ellen-Linnea Dipprey's primary interests lie in creativity and innovation as problem solving tools, the communication challenges endemic to the management of creativity and innovation in the workplace, and managerial communication. Her interest in cross-disciplinary learning and other experimental pedagogical strategies has resulted in several teaching awards. She serves as a reviewer for the International Alliance of Teacher Scholars and has long provided pedagogical guidance for Marshall Faculty across the disciplines. She won the USC-Mellon Award for Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring in 2007.