Faculty

PhD, University of Picardie; DEA, EHESS

Paul S. Adler is Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, where he holds the Harold Quinton Chair in Business Policy. He began his education in Australia and moved to France in 1974, where he received his doctorate in Economics and Management while working as a Research Economist for the French government. He came to the USA in 1981, and before arriving at USC in 1991, he was affiliated with the Brookings Institution, Columbia University, Harvard Business School, and Stanford's School of Engineering. He currently serves as President of the Academy of Management.

PhD, Columbia University; MSc, Oxford University; BA, Northwestern University

Eric Anicich studies the forms and functions of social hierarchy within groups. His research draws from and contributes to knowledge on leadership, teams, and social cognition. Professor Anicich's research has been published in leading academic journals including Organization Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, and Perspectives on Psychological Science. Additionally, accounts of his work have appeared in numerous popular media and business outlets including Forbes, The Economist, CNN, New York Times, TIME, Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Scientific American, Inc. Magazine, and Times Higher Education (UK).

DBA, Harvard University; MM, Indian Institute of Management; BTech, Maharaja Sayajirao University

Arvind Bhambri specializes in strategic change, competitive strategy, global business development, and leadership. He has twice received the Golden Apple Award for MBA instruction. In a 2008 special report on executive MBA programs by the Wall Street Journal, Professor Bhambri was profiled as one of fourteen best EMBA professors worldwide. In 2009, he received the Evan C. Thompson Award for Learning and Teaching Innovation. Professor Bhambri has served on on the faculty of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute, Bocconi University, University of Hawaii's Advanced Management Program, and the Owner Managed Business Institute in Boston.

PhD, MBA, University of Southern California; BA, Hunter College of the City University of New York

Judith Blumenthal is an expert in strategic management; organizational design and implementation; corporate governance; and retailing. Her research has been published in the Journal of Management Inquiry, the Journal of Organizational Change Management, Performance Improvement Quarterly, and Human Resources Management, among others. In addition to her responsibilities at USC, she has served on Boards of Directors of several organizations, both public company and not-for-profit, including Guess?, Inc., the California Council on Economic Education and the Advisory Board of USC Radio (KUSC). From 1996 to 2000, she served as Associate Dean of the Marshall School of Business, and from 2000 to 2006, as USC's Chief Alumni Officer and Executive Director of the USC Alumni Association.

PhD, MSIA, Purdue University; BBA, New Mexico State University

John Boudreau is recognized for breakthrough research on human capital, talent, and sustainable competitive advantage. His large-scale and focused field research studies the future of the global HR profession, HR measurement and analytics, decision-based HR, executive mobility, HR information systems, and organizational staffing and development. He has published more than 50 books and articles, and his research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Business Week. Professor Boudreau serves as Research Director for Marshall's Center for Effective Organizations. He advises numerous organizations, including early-stage companies, global corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations.

PhD, SUNY-Buffalo; BA, University of Delaware

Peter Carnevale does research on negotiation, mediation, and organizational conflict resolution systems. He has published two books and more than 100 articles in leading scientific and management journals, often supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. He has served as the President of the International Association for Conflict Management as well as Chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.

MBA, BS, University of Southern California

David M. Carter is a national authority on sports business and strategic marketing, and the author of four books about the sport business industry. He founded the Sports Business Group in 1999 following more than ten years of consulting for the sports and entertainment industries. As a sports business consultant specializing in strategic marketing, Professor Carter has consulted for corporations, sports organizations, sports and entertainment venues, law firms, municipalities, and individual athletes. He regularly provides sports business commentary to national media concerns.

PhD, University of Southern California; MPA, BA, BS, Brigham Young University

Michael Coombs specializes in strategic management, individual and organizational development, globalization, and negotiation. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Young Man of America and of the U.S. Navy Achievement Medal. He has consulted for a variety of organizations, including ARCO Transportation Company and The Aerospace Corporation.

PhD, UCLA; MBA, BS, Cornell University

Tom Cummings is a leading expert in designing high-performing organizations and strategic change. He has published more than 20 books, including Handbook of Organization Development and Organizational Development and Change, and more than 60 articles. He has served on the editorial board or as editor for 10 journals, including Academy of Management Review. He received best paper awards in 1990 and 1994, and in 2007 received a Book of the Year Award from the Academy of Human Resource Management. Professor Cumming served as President of the Academy of Management, the leading professional organization for scholars in management and organization.

PhD, University of Southern California; MBA, BBA, American University of Beirut

Christine El-Haddad specializes in business, corporate and global strategy and has taught courses in strategy in Marshall’s undergraduate, MBA, and MS in Social Entrepreneurship programs. She has received the Golden Apple Award for excellence in teaching twice alongside multiple other teaching awards and media mentions. Dr. El-Haddad has substantial experience in designing educational programs and conferences. She has developed executive education programs for the USC Office of Continuing Education. She has also organized and delivered two highly successful day-long Marshall conferences featuring nationally renowned speakers. As a management consultant and strategist, she has advised businesses in various industries and leading nonprofits including Habitat for Humanity.

Ph.D., Stanford University

Nathanael Fast studies the factors that facilitate and hinder effective leadership. His research examines the determinants and consequences of power and status in groups and organizations as well as the interpersonal processes that lead people, ideas, and practices to become and stay prominent. He is also interested in the psychological underpinnings of social networks as well as the individual and organizational implications of the adoption of new technologies. His findings have been published in top-tier academic journals and are featured regularly in popular media outlets. He earned his Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Stanford University and has received numerous awards for his teaching and research.

PhD, UCLA; MDance, CSU-Long Beach; BA, UC-Berkeley

Trudi Ferguson has consulted widely with large and small organizations in many areas of organizational development including strategic planning, team building, executive coaching, diversity, and woman's issues. She serves on the Board of L.A. Best and Ready Set Read.

PhD, Northwestern University; MA, University of Hamburg

Peer Fiss conducts research that lies at the intersection of organization theory and strategic management. He is interested in how meaning structures shape organizational actions, how organizational practices diffuse, and how accounts framing and justifying practices are constructed. In addition, he works on configurational theory and methods using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He currently serves as associate editor of Academy of Management Review. In 2010 he received the Western Academy of Management’s Ascendant Scholar Award.

Ph.D., University of Southern California; MBA, Pepperdine University; B.S. Business Administration, Redlands University

Katharine Harrington is Professor of Clinical Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. She came to USC in 1992 after a career in consumer and mortgage banking. Her scholarly interests include organizational ethics, social entrepreneurship and crisis management. In addition to her faculty responsibilities, Katharine currently serves as USC’s chief enrollment officer.

M.S, Ph.D.,Cornell University; BA, MPA Brigham Young University

Shon Hiatt is an assistant professor of business administration at USC Marshall School of Business. He explores issues related to entrepreneurship, new-market emergence, and innovation in developed and developing economies, and his award-winning research has been published in scholarly journals and featured in media outlets. An expert in the agribusiness and energy sectors, he serves as the Faculty Director of the Food Industry Executive Program, is a faculty affiliate of the Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, and is a recipient of the 2015 Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship in Entrepreneurship Research and the 2016 Academy of Management Emerging Scholar Award. Prior to joining USC, Professor Hiatt was on faculty at Harvard Business School.

PhD, University of Toronto; BA, Peking University

Assistant Professor Nan Jia holds a PhD in Strategic Management from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Canada), and B.A. in Economics from Guanghua School of Management, Peking University (China). Her research interests include corporate political strategy, business-governance relationships, and corporate governance in international business. Her research has been published in the Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Science, and Journal of Politics. Her work is mainly empirical, but also incorporates economic modeling. She serves on the editorial boards of the Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of International Business Studies. Nan’s teaching interests and experience encompass Strategic Management and International Business.

PhD, MS, Northwestern University; BA, Wesleyan University

Peter Kim studies the dynamics of interpersonal perceptions and their implications for negotiations, work groups, and dispute resolution. His research has been published in numerous scholarly journals, has received nine national / international awards, and has been featured by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio. He serves on the editorial board of Organization Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. Professor Kim also serves on the administrative board for the Academy of Management’s Conflict Management Division and as an associate editor for the Journal of Trust Research. He received a teaching award from Northwestern Univ.'s Kellogg School of Management.

PhD, UC-Berkeley; BA, Brown University

Edward E. Lawler III has been honored as a top contributor to the fields of organizational development, organizational behavior, corporate governance, compensation, and human resource management. He is the latest recipient of the Academy of Management's Herbert Heneman Jr. Career Award. He is the author of over 400 articles and 48 books including: Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice (2011), Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (2011), Effective Human Resource Management: A Global Analysis (2012), and The Agility Factor (2014).

PhD, MS, UC-Berkeley; BS, UC-Davis

Kyle Mayer studies how firms govern relationships with other firms, with particular attention to the contract and its role in establishing a framework for the relationship. His research has been published in Organizational Science, Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, and Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He served on the editorial board of Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal. He received a Golden Apple Award in 2003, Marshall's Educator of the Year Award in 2006, and a Mellon Mentoring Award from USC in 2006.

Serving on the Marshall faculty since 1997, Michael teaches management consulting, strategy, team performance and turnarounds. As a former consulting partner/principal in the global firms of SCG, KPMG and A. T. Kearney, Michael brings over 35 years of experience in management consulting into the classroom. Michael has worked on M&A transactions and strategic repositioning efforts for some of the most well-known and respected companies in the world and has consulted to a wide range of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, prominent management consulting and investment banking firms, state and local governments and global companies. Michael has testified before legislative and judicial bodies as an expert witness and in a number of litigation cases. His primary teaching and research interests are in management consulting and professional services firms and strategy.

Ph.D., Harvard University; BS, MS, Georgetown University; MS, City University, London

Frank Nagle is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Marshall School of Business at USC. He studies the economics of IT and digitization with a focus on free digital goods using large datasets from online social networks, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage. His research examines how the digital economy and crowdsourcing are weakening firm boundaries and causing mismeasurements of productivity measures like GDP.
Prior to academia, Frank worked in information security where he responded to corporate hackings and developed a bootcamp that all FBI cyber agents must pass before entering the field. Frank earned his doctorate in Technology and Operations Management from Harvard Business School, a BS and MS in Computer Science from Georgetown University and an MS in International Business Economics from City University, London.

DBA/PhD, University of Southern California; MBA, UCLA

Thomas Hilton Olson's research and consulting focus is on strategy development and implementation, organization and human capital, leading change, and psych assessment and intervention. He has authored four books in the last five years, written 100+ scholarly articles, and made numerous presentations at national and international conferences. He was a founding member, Careers Division, and Officer/Representative-at-Large, of the Academy of Management, Officer of the Personnel Testing Council, and member of the Board of the APA and three corporations. Professor Olson is the Director of the Consulting Concentration at USC, prior equity holder (Partner) with Booz and has led hundreds of consulting engagements for private and public organizations across the globe in industry and for USC.

PhD, MS, BS, Carnegie Mellon University

Alan Patz teaches classes in the general management area. He is active the development of business simulations and experiential learning, a past president of the Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, and the author of articles published in Simulation and Gaming, Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, and New Management. He is a past chair of the Department of Management and Organization. Prior to joining USC, he was a faculty member at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Joe Raffiee is an Assistant Professor of Strategy in the Management and Organization Department within the Marshall School of Business at USC. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2016. Joe's research is focused on understanding how and when human assets lead to superior firm performance and sustainable competitive advantage with an emphasis on the antecedents and implications associated with employee mobility and employee entrepreneurship. Joe's research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Organizational behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Academy of Management Perspectives. His research has also been covered and cited by media outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Inc. magazine, and Wired.

PhD, University of Pittsburgh; MBA, Indian Institute of Management - Ahmadabad; BC, Bombay University

Nandini Rajagopalan is the Joseph A. DeBell Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organization. Her research examines platform-based markets, diversification and strategic alliances, CEO succession, and corporate governance. She has published in the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Management, and Business Horizons among others. She is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, and recipient of USC’s Mellon Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Award. She is past Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal.

PhD, NYU

Violina Rindova teaches and studies strategic innovation -- how firms create value, intangible assets, and new market opportunities through unconventional strategies across a variety of industry contexts. Her work has been published in the premier management journals and has been covered frequently in the business media, including the Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, including the “Thought Leadership” award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management (2009), and the award for outstanding scholarly contribution from Strategic Organization (2012). She served as an Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Review and is currently part of the leadership team of the Behavioral Strategy Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society.

Ph.D., University of Toronto; MBA, York University; BS University of Bucharest

Florenta Teodoridis is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. She completed her Ph.D. degree in Strategy from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto in 2014. Florenta’s main areas of interest are the economics of innovation, scientific productivity, and entrepreneurship. Her research explores the drivers and consequences of technological innovation and entrepreneurship primarily related to the organization of knowledge creation with a focus on collaboration. Prior to her Ph.D., Florenta was a technical consultant and project manager for various data-driven large-scale business decision-making projects in a variety of industries such as market-research, publishing, automotive and health-care.

MBA, University of Southern California; BA, Smith College

Jody Tolan specializes in leadership and organizational development. She has created programs to build leadership skills among emerging managers, middle managers, and senior executive teams to meet strategic and organizational goals. She has also led workshops on leading teams, management communications and strategy development. She has designed and facilitated programs in Marshall’s Office of Executive Education and consulted with Wescom Credit Union, Honda Financial Services, Allergan, BDO Seidman and Thailand Government Savings Bank. Professor Tolan began her career on Capitol Hill followed by positions in several boutique consulting firms in New York City.

PhD, Business Administration, Duke University

Leigh Plunkett Tost studies the psychological and sociological dynamics of power and status in organizations, with a particular focus on how hierarchy affects team functioning, moral judgments, and ethical decision making. She also examines the motivations underlying individuals' pursuits of prosocial change, focusing her research at the intersection of social psychology and institutional theory. Her research has been published in a broad range of academic journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Psychological Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. In addition, the implications of her research have been discussed in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.

PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara; BA, MA, Stanford University

Sarah Townsend is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization. Her research focuses on how socially and culturally constructed beliefs shape (1) how people from different groups interact with each other and thrive (or flounder) within various organizational settings, and (2) how we can intervene to increase all people’s ability to succeed. Using a multi-method approach to examine stress and performance, she measures people's cardiovascular and hormonal responses along with their self-reported thoughts and emotions and their overt behavior. Dr. Townsend's research has been published in numerous scholarly outlets, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

PhD, UCLA; MBA, Andrews University; BA, Pacific Union College

Carl Voigt teaches business policy, competitive strategy, entrepreneurship and venture initiation, and global strategy and international management. He is a three-time winner of the Golden Apple Award, and has served as Associate Dean for the undergraduate, executive MBA, and Marshall MBA programs.

PhD New York University

Cheryl Wakslak studies managerial and organizational decision-making, focusing on how proximity changes the way individuals represent information, thereby influencing judgment and behavior. Her dissertation work, which conceptualized likelihood as a form of proximity and examined a range of related judgment phenomena, was a finalist for the prestigious Society of Experimental Social Psychology Dissertation Award. In other research, she explores the allegiance people have to societal systems at different levels of analysis. Her findings have been published in numerous scholarly outlets, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Psychological Science.

PhD, AM, Stanford University; MBA, INSEAD; AB, Harvard University

Scott Wiltermuth researches how socio-environmental factors affect people’s reactions to unethical behavior and their likelihood of behaving unethically themselves. He also researches how interpersonal dynamics, such as synchrony and dominance, affect people’s willingness to cooperate with others. He has published papers in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and numerous other academic journals. His work has been reported in many media outlets, including: The Economist, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Previously, he worked in the airline industry as a strategy consultant.

PhD, UCLA; MBA, BS, Old Dominion University

Terance Wolfe is known for his work in strategic planning, executive development through team-building and coaching, and organizational assessment and change. He has authored book chapters and journal articles, and presented at conferences in the United States and abroad. Professor Wolfe's current interests are strategic mindsets, the development of strategic sense-making, and dimensions of high performance management. He has been a member of the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, World Future Society, World Affairs Council, Asian Business League, Institute of Management Consultants, and Society for Human Resource Management, and consults for a variety of private, public and not-for-profit organizations.

PhD, Columbia University; MA, Peking University; BA, Renmin University

Lori Yue is has published widely on businesses' collective action strategies, examining how businesses mobilize to organize collective action and how businesses deal with social movement protests in the market. Her research covers topics including business and community relationship, elite mobilization, network evolution, and industry self-regulation. Her recent research expands to investigate market dynamics and regulation of the emerging new economy. Lori has received numerous research awards including the Marshall School’s Dean’s Award for Research Excellence. Lori is a consulting editor of the American Journal of Sociology, and has served in the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly and Organization Science. She chairs the Research Committee of the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division of the Academy of Management. Lori is also a popular teacher, and she is a two-time recipient of the Dean's Congratulation for excellence in teaching.