Faculty Talks – Topics

Organizations that get their best and brightest working together, tackling challenges and seizing opportunities, have an amazing competitive advantage. Building a high-performance team requires that leaders establish a successful team culture, foster commitment, promote a sense of accountability and purpose, and outline clearly-defined objectives. By implementing strategies identified in this Ex Ed Talk, participants will be able to operate successfully and lead their teams to excellence. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

At least four generations make up today’s workforce, contributing to business success by increasing flexibility and creativity. Harness the multi-faceted and multi-perspective power of your team with these tips, shared by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

For any organization or team that strives to reach its goals, conflict is inevitable – but the outcome does not have to be negative. Conflict, like any other key business process, can be managed. This talk will offer the best approaches for effectively dealing with conflict, so participants can resolve issues while maintaining positive relationships, apply appropriate conflict resolution techniques to specific situations, and remain poised when tension is high. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Feedback is essential for learning and continuous improvement and can help to motivate and build good relationships depending on how it is conveyed. If you provide feedback to others – coworkers, direct reports, or your manager – this talk will help you learn to present your ideas more effectively. It will also help you to be a better receiver of feedback, even feedback that is presented awkwardly. This talk will show you how to turn feedback sessions into tools that can help you and your coworkers improve job performance and meet important goals. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

As organizations grow and change strategically, partners, managers and senior staff must lead with confidence, projecting an authentic and transparent leadership presence. People who exhibit executive presence exude a “wow factor,” or magnetism, and are able to easily guide and inspire others. While it is true that executive presence comes more naturally for some than others, the reality is that everyone can work on developing executive presence. Moreover, once you achieve it, it changes your frame of reference about who you are and about the potential power you have to positively affect others. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Political skill involves our ability to understand and effectively influence others for personal or organizational benefit. Every workplace has an intricate system of power, and you can– and should—work it ethically to your best advantage. Political skill is useful to anyone within an organization and becoming savvy with it can bring positive results for all parties, helping organizations unlock their potential. Whether we like it or not, politics are a mainstay of organizational life, and you will become more successful navigating the complicated terrain of organizational politics if you follow the strategies presented in this talk. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

Managers and staff too often view performance management as time consuming, excessively subjective, de-motivating, and ultimately unhelpful. In these cases, it does little to improve the performance of employees. It may even undermine performance as participants in the process struggle with ratings, worry about compensation, and try to make sense of performance feedback. This presentation will focus of strategies that improve and serve to reinvent our performance management approach. Presented by Dr. Gary Kohut, Professor of Management, Director, MBA Program, and Director, Dual MBA Program and EGADE Business School Tecnológico de Monterrey.

U.S. workers attend approximately 55 million meetings every day. There is likely not another work-related activity we spend so much time in, or another work-related activity we complain so much about. At the same time, meetings are more than just communication tools – meetings are a window into the very essence of organizations and employees’ experiences with the organization. This talk provides resources to better leverage and use meetings effectively and strategically to promote success, engagement, and innovation. Presented by Steven G. Rogelberg, Ph.D., UNC Charlotte Chancellor’s Professor, and Professor of Management, Organizational Science, and Psychology.

Everyone talks about the importance of strategic management, yet what are the elements of a good strategy and what is the role of the employee in regard to strategy? This talk stresses not only the importance of developing a good strategy (with the help of middle managers), but also the need to build consensus around strategy get the most out of it. Presented by Dr. Franz Kellermanns, Reese Chair and Professor of Management, Director of the Doctor of Business Administration Program.

An entrepreneurial mindset allows individuals to take advantage of signals in the environment that represent opportunity and enables organizations to become more adaptable in today’s ever-changing environment. Entrepreneurship helps drive innovation and ultimately growth within an organization. Presented by Dr. Franz Kellermanns, Reese Chair and Professor of Management, Director of the Doctor of Business Administration Program.

Management, shareholders, banks, and analysts measure financial performance to improve an organization’s overall performance. This talk provides a high level overview of the interrelationship among corporate finance, value creation, corporate governance, and risk and return. Presented by Dr. Ben Nunnally, Professor of Finance Emeritus, UNC Charlotte.

The ability to interpret financial statements to inform decision making is an imperative for leaders in today’s global markets.This is especially true in today’s ever-changing business climate. Dr. Ben Nunnally, Professor of Finance Emeritus, will share insights for leaders seeking to utilize financial data to inform their decision making.

Recent research shows that the average cost of responding to a customer’s complaint in Twitter is $1, while the average cost of interacting with a customer through a traditional call center can be close to $6. Firms that use Twitter as a social care channel are also seeing a large 19% increase in customer satisfaction. Despite these benefits, there are also challenges – many of us have heard about instances when a firm’s response to a customer’s social media query caused a major backlash.

During this talk, participants will learn how Dr. Johar mined data and used data science methods to come up with a recommendation for using Twitter responses in a prescriptive sense (specifically, to improve digital customer care), rather than in a predictive way (e.g., to forecast customer sentiment). Managers will benefit from this case study as it helps them devise an optimal strategy to manage customer sentiment in social media. Presented by Monica Johar, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems.

Widely perceived as an emerging mode of sustainable transportation, mobility on-demand (MoD) systems utilize shared vehicles, parking spaces, and information technology to move citizens from point-to-point on demand, while also allowing cities to reclaim urban land. With the industry nearly doubling biannually, global fleets accounting for 104K (2014) and 14M (2017) cars and bikes respectively, and the first autonomous vehicles already cruising the streets of cities, MoD systems are one of the most rapidly growing sectors of urban transportation. Yet, the average shared vehicle in many systems rests idle each day for almost as much time as a private one, while dispatch costs, congestion, carbon emissions, and land occupation frequently exceed those generated through private ownership.

In this talk, using Boston’s bike sharing system as a case, Dr. Papanikolaou will demonstrate a data-driven system dynamics modeling approach that allows decision-makers to interactively explore scenarios in MoD systems, such as: by how much will traffic, fleet, or parking requirements change for a marginal change in dispatch (rebalancing) work?

Objective: Managers will benefit from this case study as it helps them better understand how systems analysis can improve planning, predict problems, and devise optimal operations strategies for MoD systems, particularly in anticipation of self-driving technologies. Participants will also view unique examples of data representation and visualization that help build compelling arguments. Presented by Dr. Dimitris Papanikolaou, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Software and Information Systems.

This talk provides participants with an overview of cutting edge research findings, highlighting the performance benefits of family firms (e.g., lower governance cost), as well as the potential downsides (e.g., negative forms of conflict, nepotism). Dr. Kellermanns also discusses the unique consequences of socio-emotional wealth (owner’s pride) on family firm performance and behavior. Presented by Dr. Franz Kellermanns, Reese Chair and Professor of Management, Director of the Doctor of Business Administration Program.

The Fredo-Effect is termed after the behavior of Fredo Corleone in the movie The Godfather. About a third of all family firms experience negative consequences due to the involvement of family members in the firm, and the Fredo-Effect is one of the leading causes. The Fredo-Effect stems from the special relationship between children and their parents. This talk highlights safeguards and best practices for family firms, as well as recommendations for building a productive culture. Presented by Dr. Franz Kellermanns, Reese Chair and Professor of Management, Director of the Doctor of Business Administration Program