Strengthening our community with fresh perspectives

At our first faculty meeting of the year earlier this month, Dean of Faculty and Research Suzanne Shu announced our impressive slate of new faculty hires. She rightfully thanked our colleagues who served on the 20 search committees that did the heavy lifting and, of course, our many other faculty who met with these individuals as prospective hires. They clearly made a positive impression which helped them decide to join us. And join us they did!

This new group adds to our expertise in exciting ways. Some arrive fresh from graduate work, others from peer schools, and yet others from industry to help fortify many teaching programs. All are doing inspiring research and innovative teaching, they expand our scope and breadth of talent, and they reach boldly across disciplines and industries.

Cluster hires work

It is hard to focus on any one individual hire to showcase, as I want to feature all of them. But there were some innovative recruiting approaches that yielded six of the 20 successful hires this year. Within two of our seven area groups, faculty hiring lines were authorized such that they straddled across at least two of our schools – specifically, in Operations, Technology, and Information Management (OTIM) and Finance. The separate search teams originally assembled across schools combined their efforts to effect what we affectionately refer to as “cluster hires.” This resulted in what we believe were much deeper and broader pools of applicants and in just terrific outcomes in terms of the hires we successfully made. In OTIM, faculty lines were authorized to affiliate with the Nolan Hotel School and the Johnson School, respectively. This cluster search yielded two faculty members affiliated with Nolan in Meng Qi and Ruihao Zhu, as well as Nur Kaynar with Johnson. Meng arrives from Berkeley’s Industrial Engineering PhD program, Ruihao comes to us from Purdue’s Krannert School with his PhD at MIT Sloan, and Nur just finished her PhD at UCLA Anderson. All three specialize in optimization, statistics, and machine learning techniques with intriguing, varied applications for sales forecasting, smart-order routing, and other supply chain management and retail operations topics. What a powerhouse of new skills in ML to join our existing strengths in that area within the College and across Cornell at the Bowers School, Engineering and Statistical and Data Sciences.

The other cluster hiring success was in Finance, where three lines straddled across the Dyson School and the Johnson School. Affiliated with Dyson, we hired Lawrence Jin away from Caltech, and affiliated with Johnson, we recruited Kelly Posenau, newly minted PhD from Chicago Booth and Mao Ye hired away from Illinois. Mao’s expertise is in big data analytics with market trading and Fintech applications, Lawrence specializes in behavioral finance topics, and Kelly’s work lies at the nexus of corporate finance, financial institutions, and sustainability. This group is going to fortify our Fintech@Cornell initiative and our new, cross-school/cross-disciplinary Business of Sustainability theme, which are both charging ahead, and it will build out our legacy strengths in Behavioral Economics and Decision Research.

Welcome Meng, Ruihao, Nur, Michaela, Mao, and Lawrence and to all of our new colleagues (about whom I will surely boast in future blog posts!). You all make us stronger together.

Our faculty growth must continue

This hiring effort now is critical. After all, expectations and responsibilities are evolving and quickly. For one, our next AACSB accreditation initiative draws nigh (May 2024). The new 2020 business accreditation standards are putting even greater emphasis on thought leadership, as well as engagement and societal impact (new Standard 9). Our college is going to relish the opportunity to showcase how we as a business school — and business, in general — are a force for good in society. It is central to our college’s mission statement to be the pre-eminent college of business in the world to develop future business leaders who advance shared, sustainable prosperity.

We also just completed our Sharing of Information on Progress (SIP) as a signatory for the United Nations Global Compact’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). PRME is a consortium of 850+ business schools around the world committed to the development of current and future managers of sustainable value, global social responsibility, leadership, engaged partnership and dialogue. Our SIP report showcases all the good work we do in our teaching programs, our engaged learning initiatives, research, and co-curricular events.

I am particularly proud of our PRME-aligned accomplishments as I now serve as a newly elected member of the global PRME board. My first in-person board meeting just took place this week in the Kofi Annan Board Room in the UN Global Compact offices next to the main UN buildings in New York. The PRME Secretariat staff were welcoming, fellow board members were inspiring, and the organization has grand aspirations to grow its influence among business schools all around the world. I am happily showing off around the office my new lapel pin of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)!

A great place to work for all

I am not sure if it was the inspiration of our new class of faculty hires, or the highly-energized Staff Advisory Group meeting I had last week (likely both!), but I feel so confidently that our college is a great place to work – for all. We are all thinking creative thoughts about how to build a more engaged community at our great college with lots of ideas for new activities, new staff awards and recognitions, and more.

All of these initiatives have prompted me to pick up Michael C. Bush’s 2018 book, A Great Place to Work for All (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Bush and his team are the group that produce the popular FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For ranking. I am enthralled by the logic that they use to build their framework. The book talks about how much the world of work has changed and how great leaders understand that an innovative and mission-driven organization that truly lives its values is what separates one from the thousands of others competing for the best talent.

The central thesis is the importance of building a high-trust culture. While a quick read, very accessible in form, the book does not shy away from talking about the research. My favorite is the analysis of differential financial performance (loved the deep dive in Chapter 2 on London Business School’s Alex Edmans’ 2011 study in the Journal of Financial Economics, but there are supportive findings of revenue growth, accretive earnings, lower employee turnover rates, and even high-trust hospitals with healthier marks.

The book was written before the COVID pandemic – I wonder how much more valuable these intangible qualities of inclusivity, belonging and mission-aligned inspiration are now, given the ever-more-intense war for top talent post-COVID.

And I could not leave without mentioning…

How saddened were many of us in our Cornell and College community to learn of the passing of Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth. We send our deepest condolences to His Majesty, The King Charles, and members of the Royal Family at this time.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Mark Nelson for his unstinting service to our college leadership. After six years as dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Mark has decided to step away from deanship and return to the teaching and research faculty he joined in 1990. Mark has powerful stories about the Johnson lions who mentored him; make a point of asking him to share some when you see him. During his tenure as dean, Mark enhanced collaboration with Cornell Tech, increased our footprint with the opening of the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education and the Tata Innovation Center, deepened alumni relationships and successful fundraising, managed faculty, staff and student initiatives in response to COVID-19, and, perhaps most critically, stewarded our academic offerings with new and strengthened degree programs, immersions, and fellowship opportunities for our students. I invite your own stories as we prepare to celebrate Mark properly on this transition.

Let me add a special note of thanks to our generous hosts, Dean Sherr Gibbs and Professor Patrick Washington, both of the Morehouse College’s Business School. Associate Dean Michelle Duguid and I traveled to Atlanta in September to make several presentations to undergraduate students at Morehouse about possible pathways to research and teaching careers in business and management. The academy needs to inspire young people who come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to pursue advanced degrees, including PhDs, in business to build out the pipeline for the future. As Cornell officers, Michelle and I were representing a new consortium of top business schools called PREDOC (Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers) that aims to foster a talented, diverse, and inclusive community in business and social sciences at large. Drs. Gibbs and Washington introduced us to dozens of young students, all inquiring minds keen to ask us all the important questions about what academic life is and what it can be.