November 2005

New Faculty Bring Added Expertise

Three senior professors—one each in the fields of accounting, organizational behavior, and marketing—joined the faculty this quarter, along with six junior faculty in tenure-track positions.

The School’s accounting group added David Larcker, professor of accounting, who publishes widely in the areas of compensation, managerial performance measures, and corporate governance. Larcker, most recently the Ernst & Young Professor in Accounting at the Wharton School of Management, is a leading empirical researcher in management accounting and will teach the MBA core course Managerial Accounting.

Organizational change expert Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao joined the faculty from the Kellogg School of Management, where he was the Richard L. Thomas Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change. Published widely in the fields of management and sociology, he studies the social and cultural causes of organizational change. He also serves as the associate editor of Administrative Science Quarterly. As professor of organizational behavior, he will teach Human Resource Management.

Marketers will want to take note of work by Baba Shiv, associate professor of marketing, on the characteristics of “mindless” or very-low-involvement decision making. Shiv, who earned his doctorate at Duke University and was most recently an associate professor and research fellow at the University of Iowa, examines the role of emotion in decision-making, the neuro-physiological bases of emotions, and unconscious mental processes. He will teach Advertising and Communications Management.

The School also added six assistant professors, all 2005 graduates of leading doctoral programs.

John Hatfield is a graduate of Stanford’s Economics Department. His research involves issues in microeconomic theory, political economy, and public finance. Gerard Padró i Miquel completed his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches issues in political economy and development economics. Both Padró i Miquel and Hatfield will teach the MBA core course Strategy in the Business Environment.

Joy Ishii and Michael Ostrovsky are graduates in economics from Harvard University. Ishii researches issues in industrial organization and corporate finance. She will teach the MBA core course Finance. Ostrovsky is primarily focused on game theory, industrial organization, and finance. He will teach the MBA core course Managerial Economics.

Harikesh Nair and Sridhar Narayanan completed doctorates in marketing at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. Nair researches issues in high-technology product markets, network effects, empirical industrial organization, and diffusion of technologies. He will teach the MBA elective course Pricing Strategy and Analysis. Narayanan focuses on new products and advertising, empirical industrial organization, and Bayesian econometrics. He will teach the MBA core course Marketing Management.

Students Honor Professors Kasznik, Peterson, Skrzypacz

Commitment to clarity in the classroom and accessibility outside of it were greatly appreciated by Business School students who in May presented their annual outstanding teaching awards to three faculty members.

MBA students cited lecturer Joel Peterson for his high commitment to personal values as they selected him for their program’s annual distinguished teaching award. Doctoral students honored Andrzej “Andy” Skrzypacz, associate professor of economics, for his exemplary teaching and service to students in the PhD Program. Students in the Sloan Master’s Program chose to honor Ron Kasznik, associate professor of accounting, who was cited for his clarity and enthusiasm. A member of the faculty since 1995, Kasznik previously had been honored by the Sloan classes of 2001 and 2003.

Ron Ih, Sloan ’05, had this to say about Kasznik: “While it cannot be said that what you taught was everyone’s favorite subject, it was your passion for the art of teaching and the enthusiasm you brought to the classroom that made you our favorite professor.”
Doctoral students, for whom faculty are career role models, nominated Skrzypacz for his commitment to research, advising, teaching, and community. “He has set such a high standard of dedication to his students that it is really hard for us to match,” said William Fuchs, PhD ’05, a member of the award review committee.

In accepting the honor, Skrzypacz, who joined the faculty in 2000, credited his own advisors at the Warsaw School of Economics and the University of Rochester for shaping his approach to the role.

Student testimonials to Peterson included one from a student who said he had booked a 30-minute appointment with Peterson to discuss a business idea. “He ended up chatting with me for over two hours as if I were the only person on his calendar.”
Another student wrote that Peterson “brings an uncommon sense of purpose, clarity, accessibility, and presence to the classroom that motivates students.”

Peterson, the founder of a private equity firm, in turn thanked members of the MBA Class of 2005 for initiating the development of a new organizational behavior elective, Leadership Perspectives, which he co-taught in the fall of 2004 with Professor Charles O’Reilly. Previously, Peterson co-taught the elective course Principles of Real Estate Investing with Professor Steven Grenadier.

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

Singleton Joins Dean’s Office

Professor Ken Singleton, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, joined Professors Mary Barth, PhD ’89, and David Kreps in June as a senior associate dean for academic affairs in the School’s Office of the Dean. Singleton oversees faculty in the finance area, the PhD Program, the Center for Global Business and the Economy, and research computing. Barth oversees the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Sloan Master’s Program, and faculty in the academic fields of accounting, political economy, marketing, and operations, information, and technology. Kreps is responsible for the MBA Program, the Center for Social Innovation, the Center for Leadership Development and Research, and faculty in economics and organizational behavior. The three are supported by Christina Einstein and her staff. Professor John Roberts continues with Executive Education and as dean’s liaison with global partners and inquiries. Dan Rudolph, MBA ’81, oversees all operational aspects of the school.

New Book on Trust in Organizations

A new book co-edited by Roderick Kramer explores the topic Trust and Distrust in Organizations. Kramer is the William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Business School. With Stanford sociology Professor Karen Cook, he compiled important research on trust in organizations that illuminates the complex nature of how trust develops, functions, and often is thwarted between people of unequal power or of similar power. Kramer and Dana Gavrieli, MA ’04, wrote a chapter on recently declassified data from secret conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and his advisors that provide a rich window into a leader’s struggles with problems of trust and distrust in his administration.