Executive Development Institute Faculty

Vanderbilt business professors and industry presenters bring expert insight and instruction to the classroom. Each faculty member draws upon extensive experience as well as insights afforded by his or her innovative and enlightening research. These individuals provide the primary benefit of both Open Enrollment and Custom Programs for organizations—proven, practical management education designed for immediate application.

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Germain Boer

Professor of Accounting; Director of Owen Entrepreneurship Center

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Germain Böer has initiated numerous innovative entrepreneurship activities at Owen, including an annual conference and student sessions with venture capitalists. Germain currently serves as an advisor to startup companies in the Nashville area and is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Accounting and Public Policy and Strategic Finance.
Video: The Owen Entrepreneurship Center
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Jim Bradford

Dean; Ralph Owen Professor for the Practice of Management

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Jim Bradford has vast experience managing complex organizations as well as a deep commitment to Owen's mission. Jim joined Owen from industry, having served as President and CEO for AFG Industries, Inc. North America's largest vertically integrated glass manufacturing and fabrication company. He earned a B.A. University of Florida and his JD with numerous honors from Vanderbilt Law School. His employment history also includes 11 years of private legal practice and serving as General Counsel for AFG Industries, Inc. during its years as a publicly traded company. His academic areas of interest are primarily in global and domestic corporate business strategy and competitive analysis. He is the recipient of the Owen Teaching Award.
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Michael Burcham

Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship; President, Nashville Entrepreneur Center

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Michael Burcham has over 20 years of extensive experience in health care innovation, entrepreneurship, and startup venture coaching. He is a highly successful three-time entrepreneur–most recently President of ParadigmHealth, a $300-million disease management firm. In addition to his post at Vanderbilt, Michael serves as President of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

Video: Thinking Like a CEO
Video: Accelerator Featured on VUCAST
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Paul Chaney

E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Accounting

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Paul Chaney joined the Owen faculty in 1984. His landmark study—which found direct correlation between public perception of an auditor’s reputation and a company's market value—received significant national news coverage in the wake of the Andersen-Enron debacle.
Video: Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Managers
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Richard Daft

Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management

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Richard Daft is a noted expert in change management, organization behavior, organization design and leadership. He has published 12 books and dozens of articles on the subject. He also developed and managed the Center for Change Leadership. Richard's books on organization management and leadership are the most widely used in their categories at business schools around the world, including his latest, The Executive and the Elephant: A Leader's Guide to Building Inner Excellence.
Video: Leadership
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Ray Friedman

Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management; Associate Dean for Faculty and Research

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Ray Friedman is an expert in human organizational behavior focused on understanding how cultural differences and backgrounds influence both negotiation and conflict resolution. He is also a leading expert in Chinese management, focusing on conflict styles, negotiation arbitration and biculturalism in management.
Video: Doing Business in China
Video: The Obama Effect
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Luke Froeb

William C. Oehmig Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise

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Luke Froeb joined the Owen faculty in 1993 as an expert in the economics of competition policy. From 2003 to 2005, he was appointed Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, where government antitrust agencies widely used his merger models to predict anticompetitive behavior.
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David Furse

Adjunct Professor of Management

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David Furse combines experience from three distinct careers—marketing professor, successful entrepreneur and business strategy consultant—to his teaching and research. His lively classroom approach comes from the application of theory and tools to practical business problems that students face in their own careers.
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Steve Hoeffler

Associate Professor of Marketing

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Steve Hoeffler is an expert in consumer products marketing, brand management and consumer behavior, including the marketing of "really new" (novel) products and the development of consumer preferences. He has also served a variety of marketing roles for NCR/AT&T and has consulted for Procter and Gamble, IBM and Fujitsu.
Video: Radically New Products
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Nancy Lea Hyer

Associate Professor of Operations Management; Associate Dean of Academic Programs

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Nancy Lea Hyer is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. Nancy earned her MBA and Ph.D. from Indiana University and holds a BS from the University of Richmond. At Owen, Nancy teaches executive and MBA classes focused on project management and process improvement. Nancy has also taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has won executive program, Executive MBA, and MBA teaching awards, and both school and university-wide awards for excellence in undergraduate education. She won the 2009 best paper award from the Journal of Operations Management for a study co-authored with a faculty member from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Video: Cellular Manufacturing
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Mumin Kurtulus

Assistant Professor of Operations Management

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Mumin Kurtulus has presented at conferences worldwide, received the Wickham Skinner Best Paper Award in 2006, the gold medal in the 2004 ECR Student Paper Competition and was a finalist for the EURO 2003 Management Science Strategic Innovation Prize. His current research interests include supplier-retailer collaboration practices in the consumer goods industry with a focus on investigating recent supply chain collaboration practices such as collaborative forecasting and category captainship.
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Craig Lewis

Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management in Finance

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Craig Lewis, the Finance-area coordinator, joined the Owen faculty in 1986 and has been widely published since that time on such financial issues as volatility, debt and capital structure. His interests include equity analyst behavior, the security issue process and corporate financial policy.
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Brian McCann

Visiting Faculty in Strategic Management

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Brian McCann is an expert in strategic management and entrepreneurship. He joined the Owen faculty in 2009 after completing his PhD in strategic management from Purdue and is a co-author, with Luke Froeb, of the leading textbook Managerial Economics: A Problem-Solving Approach.
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David Owens

Clinical Professor of Business Strategy and Innovation; Faculty Director, Executive Development Institute

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David Owens’s research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the London Guardian and NPR’s Marketplace. His work in the area of business strategy, innovation process and product development has included engagements with NASA, LEGO, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. He has also performed product design consulting work for a variety of firms including Daimler Benz, Apple Computer, and Coleman Camping. Most recently, while on leave from Vanderbilt University, Owens served as CEO of Griffin Technology Inc., the largest consumer electronics firm in the MP3/iPod accessory market space.
Video: Strategic Innovation
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Kimberly Pace

Clinical Professor of Communication

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Kimberly Pace teaches courses in leadership communications and public relations at Owen and uses her formal training in the performing arts to bring a unique perspective to business education and practice. Before joining Vanderbilt, she served in marketing and communications roles for two international faith-based non-profit agencies located in Nashville, served as a communications consultant and has taught branding and public relation seminars for professional communicators.
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Rangaraj Ramanujam

Associate Professor of Management

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Rangaraj "Ranga" Ramanujam is a leading researcher and consultant on the organizational causes and consequences of errors in high-risk work settings. His research has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Medical Care, Journal of Patient Safety, Journal of Applied Psychology, and other journals.
Video: Reducing Errors in the Health Care Environment
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Jacob Sagi

Vanderbilt Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Finance

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Jacob Sagi is an expert on financial economics and decision theory. His research on asset pricing and decision-making under risk and uncertainty has appeared in such leading publications as Econometrica, The Journal of Economic Theory, The Journal of Financial Economics, Economic Theory, and the Journal of Mathematical Economics. Among his current research interests in finance are the economics of delegated fund and portfolio management, the intersection of asset pricing with macroeconomics, real options, and real estate markets. His decision theory interests include the modeling of decision making under uncertainty, unforeseen contingencies, and reference-dependent choice.
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James Schorr

Professor for the Practice of Business and Society

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Jim Schorr teaches Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility (CSR) and Social Entrepreneurship at the Owen Graduate School of Management. Prior to joining Owen in 2008, Jim's accomplishments included roles in founding/leading Net Impact and Juma Ventures. He received his BS in Economics from the University of Tennessee and his MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Video: Corporate Social Responsibility
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Lawrence Van Horn

Associate Professor of Health Care Management; Executive Director of Health Affairs for Owen

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Lawrence Van Horn is a leading expert on health care management and economics. His research on health care organizations, managerial incentives in nonprofit hospitals and the conduct of managed care firms has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Law and Economics and Harvard Business Review. He has consulted with government and health care organizations and has presented at numerous seminars and conferences sponsored by industry, government and academic institutions.
Video: The Health Care Industry
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Bart Victor

Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership

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Bart Victor joined the Owen faculty from the Institute for Management Development International (IMD), in Lausanne, Switzerland where he was Professor of Management and Director of the Program for Management Development. Prior to IMD, Bart was on the faculties of the University of North Carolina and the University of Nebraska. He is a member of several professional organizations, including the Academy of Management and the International Association for Business and Society.
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Tim Vogus

Assistant Professor of Management

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Tim Vogus joined the Owen faculty in 2004 and specializes in such topics as leading teams and organizations, as well as negotiation. Prior to his academic career, he was a business process analyst for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), where he worked on competitive intelligence systems and multiple system implementations.

Affiliated Faculty

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Mark Abkowitz

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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Mark Abkowitz is the founder and former Chairman of Visual Risk Technologies, an operational risk management consulting firm. Mark specializes in the management, assessment and communication of risks impacting safety, security and the environment. He has appeared on National Public Radio, Fox News and CNBC to discuss risk issues.
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Karen Brown

Professor of Operations and Project Leadership at Thunderbird School of Global Management

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Karen Brown is a member of the faculty at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, and a visiting professor at the China-Europe International Business School in Shanghai, where she spends two months each year. She is currently on an educational leave of absence from the University of Washington. In addition to her role as a faculty member teaching M.B.A. and E.M.B.A. classes, she has consulted and led seminars for numerous private- and public-sector organizations, including Boeing, PACCAR, POSCO Steel, Mosaic, Emerson Electric, Sony, Philips, Seattle City Light, Seattle Public Library, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
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Mark Cannon

Associate Professor of Leadership and Organizations

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Mark Cannon is seasoned executive coach and is an expert in teaching skills for executive coaching, delivering feedback, and handling difficult conversations. He has published books and articles on these topics. He has taught in George Washington University's Coaching Certification Program, and coached or consulted with Courage Capital Management, Vanderbilt University Medical School, Women's World Banking, DCI, Monitor Company, Marriott Corporation, Little Planet Learning, and the U.S. Department of State.
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David M. Dilts

Director of Strategy Alignment for the Knight Cancer Institute;
Professor of Management and co-director of the Center for Management Research in Healthcare at Oregon Health & Science University

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Dr. Dilts is Director of Strategy Alignment for the Knight Cancer Institute, Professor of Management and co-director of the Center for Management Research in Healthcare (cMRHc.org) at the Oregon Health & Science University. He formerly held a position as Professor of Operations Management at the Owen School, and was founder and Professor of Engineering Management in the Vanderbilt School of Engineering. In his current position he is responsible for aligning all the diverse pieces of a major cancer institute for strategic and research excellence. His work has been published in nearly 200 articles, editorials, conference papers and presentations, book chapters, books and monographs, and his research has been supported at nearly $20 million for the past decade. Dr. Dilts is a recipient of the 2011 National Institute of Health Merit Group Award.
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Corbette Doyle

Lecturer, Organizational Leadership

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Corbette Doyle’s areas of expertise are diversity in the workplace, gender issues, risk financing and the healthcare industry. In 2006, APIW named her the Insurance Woman of the Year and Risk & Insurance named her one of their inaugural “99 Power Brokers.”
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Jeff Gowdy

Founder and CEO, J. Gowdy Consulting

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Jeff Gowdy is an expert in the field of sustainability, with over nine years experience with sustainability initiatives, including client projects with Bridgestone, General Electric, and Wal-Mart. He holds a BS in Systems Engineering from University of Virginia and an MBA in Strategy and Environmental Management from Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management.
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Rick Schell

Lecturer in Communications/Director, Undergraduate Business Minor Program, Rice University

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Rick Schell brings a unique blend of classroom and business experience to his teaching and consulting engagements. After earning a PhD in English Literature from Rice University, he spent 30 years in leadership positions in sales, marketing, and sales education in the Information Technology industry, working for IBM, the Amdahl Corporation, and Fujitsu Ltd. Rick teaches Leadership Communications and Consultative Selling at the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University.