Nearly 200 New Profs At Top B-Schools

USC Marshall added 19 new professors to its ranks this year, among the most of any top B-school

CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT: EVAN RAWLEY, MINNESOTA CARLSON

Like Susan Harmeling, Evan Rawley has an Ivy League degree and teaches entrepreneurship; unlike her, he went from a big school to a much smaller one. Rawley spent the last five years teaching at Columbia, which in 2017 has an enrollment of 753; now he’s a new associate professor in the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Minnesota Carlson, where the enrollment hovers around 100.

Evan Rawley joins Minnesota Carlson after five years at Columbia. Courtesy photo

It’s a big change — but Rawley, who teaches Industry Analysis and Corporate Strategy, tells P&Q that he is relishing every moment, given Carlson’s “top-notch” caliber of student and “very strong research faculty.” “Its research ranking is well above the MBA ranking — it’s a place that isn’t as much on the radar as Columbia or Wharton, but it’s got great faculty and people with great ideas and very interesting seminars,” he says. “I’m a researcher first and that’s what excited me about Carlson.”

Rawley’s research on technology adoption in the taxicab industry, specifically the impact of Uber and other ride-sharing innovations, has gotten him a lot of attention this year, including mentions in the New Yorker, Wired, and other major media outlets. It’s a cinch that it will be mentioned in his classrooms, too, he says.

“You can discuss Uber in many different capacities, so it’s a great topic for Corporate Strategy because it has not just one product but a whole portfolio of products — not only UberX and Uber BLACK but also UberEats, and they’re thinking about expanding the product scope of the firm,” Rawly tells P&Q. “Also they’re geographically diversified — they operate in many different countries. So Uber is a great one to talk about when you talk about corporate scope, but it’s also great for Industry Analysis because there’s a lot of interesting dynamics between Uber and Lyft and Uber and the taxi industry, and also you get some market strategy elements because of the role of regulation.

“We’re definitely gonna talk about Uber a lot in both classes.”

CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT: JULIA LEE, MICHIGAN ROSS

Julia Lee is a new assistant professor at Michigan Ross. She teaches Behavioral Theory in Management, a core course. Courtesy photo

Most of the new professors at the elite B-school campuses in the U.S. this year, 96 in all, are truly new, having never taught MBA courses as professors before. Far fewer on the list of 96 fresh faces are profs with non-business backgrounds. Julia Lee, who joins the management and organizations faculty at Michigan Ross this fall after receiving her Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School, is one of them.

Lee, who teaches the core Behavioral Theory in Management course, has worked with the Behavioral Insights Group (BIG) at Harvard University and Decision Lab at the University of Michigan. Her passion, before coming to Ross, was — and still is, she insists — her work with nonprofits in South Korea to help North Korean defectors.

But it was while doing her master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School (her second master’s — she also has a degree in East Asia political economy) that Lee was first exposed to the idea of studying the psychology of decision making. “That subject was so fascinating that I couldn’t stop talking about it,” she tells P&Q. “I ended up switching from more political science/national security major to studying judgment and decision making.” The leap to business education was complete when she was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Ross, which she did from 2015 to 2017. Lee’s studies now include research into employee social networks and their impact on psychological, physiological, and organizational outcomes, as well as the consequences of engaging in ethically questionable behavior. Her appointment as assistant professor is “a dream come true in so many ways,” she says.

“When I came here as a post-doc two years ago to learn more about the research that is being done at Ross, I learned that a lot of my colleagues are really focused on, ‘How do we make our research such that we can really help people, help front-line workers and not just managers?’ And so I met a lot of really inspiring people here who are very much dedicated to having that goal in mind. There’s a perception that business schools care only about shareholder value, and that is really not the case here. The decision to stay here was really easy.”

CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT: TRISTAN BOTELHO, YALE SOM

Tristan Botelho received his Ph.D. from MIT Sloan this year and will teach Entrepreneurship and New Ventures at Yale SOM in the spring. Courtesy photo

Like Julia Lee, Tristan Botelho never held the title of “professor” before this fall. Botelho joins Yale School of Management as assistant professor of organizational behavior after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT Sloan. He’ll teach Entrepreneurship and New Ventures in the spring.

For Botelho, Yale SOM was the obvious choice in terms of research fit. His areas of study include entrepreneurship, evaluation processes, organization theory, and strategy; most recently he has explored how gender and social influence — factors unrelated to quality — affect the ratings received by investment professionals. All these are areas where Yale SOM has put down educational markers. “I had some exposure to the faculty, being so close at MIT, so I knew the kind of work they were doing and they really appreciated the kind of work that I was doing,” Botelho tells P&Q. “I had a chance to meet with the Program on Entrepreneurship, which I am going be affiliated with, and there was a lot of growth and excitement around doing research in that space.”

Botelho describes his research not as one defined discipline (or “bucket”) or another, but as “going after interesting questions” on the individual or organizational or societal level. His drive to answer those questions stems from his experiences in the finance and investment banking sphere, where he worked before beginning his Ph.D. “There are always a lot of decisions being made, and it’s interesting to me to delve a little deeper into some of the reasons behind them,” he says. “I kind of look out at the real world, see something that doesn’t make sense, and then try through my research to isolate some of the levers or mechanisms that make that thing happen.” Entrepreneurship and New Ventures, his class next spring, will include looking at the different stages of the entrepreneurial process with an understanding that not everyone in an entrepreneurship class wants to start their own business — some want to work for a new business, or learn how they can bring an entrepreneurial mindset to an existing business, and “so trying my best to connect those dots for everyone will make for an exciting class.”

Botelho doesn’t reserve his passion for entrepreneurship alone. He’s also the co-author of a forthcoming paper on ratings, or “opt-in evaluation processes” — reviews of everything from investment pros to restaurants. Ratings, after all, affect everyone in the digital age. “They govern where we go to eat, where we stay, and in the ever-growing digital economy they are what makes us feel safe getting into an Uber or staying at an Airbnb,” he says. “But because this area is exploding so quickly we don’t really understand a lot of the mechanisms that might affect ratings or how they’re affecting individuals in their careers or organizations more generally.”

(See the complete list of new professors and their disciplines and years of experience on pages 3 to 5.)

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