ODC Annual Conference 2015

Organizational Design Conference 2015

Sunday, August 9th

Program

The Coffee, Lunch and Reception is sponsored by the Organizational Design Community.

Presenter biographies

William Ocasio

William Ocasio is the John L. & Helen Kellogg Professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. He was educated at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, MIT, Harvard Business School, and Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1992. Prior to coming to Kellogg, he was Assistant Professor of Stategy and Organizations at the MIT Sloan School of Management, from 1992-1995. From 1995-2001 he was Assistant Professor at Kellogg, and he in 2001 he was promoted to Full Chaired Professor.

His research links organizational politics, cognition, and culture with the study of strategic processes, corporate governance, and organizational and institutional change. His varied research interests are brought together by a focus on explaining both the determinants of organizational and industry attention and its consequences for stability and change in organizations and institutions. Currently he is studying the determinants and consequences of attention through a variety of mechanisms including specialized vocabularies of organizing, decision making structures and processes, and the development and deployment of political capital by organizational executives. His research has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Research in Organizational Behavior, and Strategic Management Journal. 

His research has won three major awards for three academic societies: the American Sociological Association, the Strategic Management Society, and the Academy of Management. In 2000, he won the W. Richard Scott Award for from the American Sociological Association for the Best Paper published in the area of Organizations, Occupations, and Work during the previous three years. He is Senior Editor at Organization Scieces and serves on the Editorial Boards of Management Research.

At the MBA level he teaches Power in Organizations. This innovative course brings together a political capital perspective on managerial power with a focus on how the value of polical capital is shaped by the organization's culture. In Spring of 2015 he will be teachng a new MBA elective on Managing Organizations for Growth. For executives he teaches Political Capital, Managing Organizational Change, and Strategic Processes. His teaching philosophy is to provide students with frameworks that will foster critical thinking skills that will make them better managers and leaders in organizations. At the Ph.D. level he teaches a Seminar on Behavior in Organizational Systems as well as a special elective on Institutional Logics and Practices. 

Prior to becoming an academic, he served as Executive Director of the Governor's Economic Advisory Council in Puerto Rico from 1986-1990. A native of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico he lives in downtown Chicago.

Building on his research and organizational experience he provides consulting services, executive education, and expert testimony to Fortune 500 firms, law firms as well as to federal and state governments

Tyler Wry

Tyler Wry studies how startup firms navigate between competing goals, such as the pursuit of social and financial aim or the integration of science and technology, and how these processes are shaped by factors in the external environment.  Focusing broadly on these issues, Tyler’s work has appeared in outlets such as the Academy of Management Annals, the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Business Venturing, and Organization Science.  Early stage work has also been recognized with best paper and early career achievement awards by the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business, and the European Group for Organization Studies. In his spare time, Tyler is an exhausted dad who likes to play the occasional game of squash.

Arden Hoffman

Arden Hoffman is the VP of People at Dropbox, where she leads global HR and recruiting. Prior to joining Dropbox, Arden led People Operations for the Global Business Organization at Google, where she was responsible for managing all HR programs and processes, including learning and development, diversity initiatives, and recruiting and retaining talent. Previously, Arden held multiple roles at Goldman Sachs, including VP of Talent Development and VP of Goldman Sachs University.  Arden received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley and her MBA in Strategy and Organizational Development from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Carliss Y. Baldwin

Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and its impact on firm strategy and the structure of business ecosystems. With Kim Clark, she authored Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity, the first of a projected two volumes. Volume 2, Modularity on Trial, will consider how modular technologies are affecting the basic structure of the global economy—for good and for bad.

Baldwin received a bachelor's degree in economics from MIT in 1972, and MBA and DBA degrees from Harvard Business School. She developed and taught Mergers & Acquisitions, a second-year MBA course, and presently teaches Finance 2, a first-year required course.

She has served on numerous corporate and non-profit boards. At Harvard Business School, she has been a Director of Research, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Planning, and head of the Doctoral Programs. Within Harvard University, she has been on the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the policy and admissions committee of the joint Ph.D program in Science, Technology and Management.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf joined New York University Stern School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences in July 2013. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf’s research focuses on developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of scientific and technological innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. Her dissertation included an in-depth longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with opening knowledge boundaries through Web platforms and communities, resulting in a scientific breakthrough. 

Her work has been presented and discussed at multiple conferences and seminars in leading global business schools including MIT, Wharton, INSEAD, Bocconi, IESE, UCL, UT Austin, Technion, Tel Aviv University, and Hebrew University.

Prior to academia, Professor Lifshitz-Assaf worked as a strategy consultant for seven years, specializing in growth and innovation strategy. She held related posts at a consulting firm and at a several corporate centers of large international firms in finance and telecommunications. 

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf earned a BA in Management and a LLB in Law from Tel Aviv University, Israel, both magna cum laude, specializing in antitrust law.  She received an MBA, magna cum laude, from Tel Aviv University (exchange program with NYU Stern), where she studied strategy & entrepreneurship.

Ron Nicol

Ron Nicol is Senior Partner and Managing Director for BCG.

• BCG Leadership Positions
• • Americas' Regional Chair (responsible for the operation of BCG's business in North, Central, and South America)
  • Worldwide head of BCG's Global Practices
  • Worldwide head of BCG's Organization Practice
  • Worldwide head of BCG's Technology, Media and Telco Practice
  • BCG Executive Committee for 10 years
• Relevant BCG project experience
  
• • Delayered American Airlines, AT&T, and over 20 other major Fortune 100  or their global equivalents
  • Major organization restructuring of a global pharma, Canadian bank, and numerous other organizations
  • Led BCG team in assisting the Michael Dell and the Dell Board of Directors in the 2013 go-private transaction
  • Conducted numerous technology organization transformation projects over the years 
  • Developed BCG's Organization Delayering process and has executed it over 30 times in the last 25 years with some of the largest global organizations
  • Named one of the top 25 global consultants by Consulting Magazine
• Work experience prior to BCG
  
• • Mr. Nicol held senior positions with Babcock and Wilcox, in engineering, marketing, and operations mgmt.
  • US Naval Officer, serving aboard a nuclear ballistic missile submarine and teaching postgraduate nuclear engineering
• Education
  
• • BS in Physics with honors from the United States Naval Academy where he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor Society Prize for outstanding academic achievement
  • MBA from Duke University where he was named Fuqua Scholar.
  • Currently Chairman of the Board of Visitors of Duke's Fuqua School of Business

Henk W. Volberda is a professor of strategic management and business policy at the Department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). His work on strategic renewal, coevolution and new organizational forms has led to an extensive number of published articles in academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Decision Support Systems, European Business Forum, European Management Journal, European Management Review, Global Strategic Management, International Journal of Disclosure and Governance, International Studies of Management & Organization, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management,Long Range Planning, Management Science, Omega, Organization Development Journal, Organization Studies and Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal and Technology Analysis & Strategic Management.

He is the author of “Building the Flexible Firm: How to Remain Competitive” (Oxford University Press 1998) and “De Flexibele Onderneming: Strategieen voor Succesvol Concurreren” (Kluwer 2004) both of which received wide acclaim. A book he co-wrote with Tom Elfring, Rethinking Strategy (Sage, 2001), was awarded the ERIM Best Book Award. His latest book is entitled Strategic Management: Competitiveness and Globalization and was published in April 2011 and is used as Strategy textbook in many European top business schools. He recently wrote "Innovation 3.0" that is already in its second edition.

Professor Volberda has received multiple awards for his research on organizational flexibility and strategic change. He is the recipient of the NCD Award, the ERASM Research Award, the Erasmus University Research Award, the Igor Ansoff Strategic Management Award, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Strategy Award, the Erim Impact Award and 2005 and the SAP Strategy Award.

For his work on alliance capabilities conducted together with Ard-Pieter de Man and Johan Draulans he received the Dutch ROA Award 1999 (best consultancy article). His research on absorptive capacity and internal networks conducted together with Raymond van Wijk and Frans van den Bosch received an honorable mention in the McKinsey/SMS Best Conference Paper Prize.

Professor Volberda is Professor of Strategic Management & Business Policy and also director of Knowledge Transfer at Rotterdam School of Management. Moreover, he is Scientific Director of INSCOPE: Research for Innovation, a research consortium involving Erasmus University, Maastricht University, University of Twente and TNO.

He is director of the Erasmus Strategic Renewal Program and program director of ERIM. He has worked as a consultant for many large European corporations.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Long Range Planning, the Journal of International Business Studies, the Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, Management Executive, and Maanblad voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie (MAB). He is a member of the editorial review boards of the Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Strategy and Management, Organization Science and Organization Studies.

Professor Volberda has been a visiting scholar at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and City University Business School in London.

He obtained his PhD in Business Administration Cum Laude from the University of Groningen.

Russell Funk

Russell Funk is an assistant professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship group at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Before joining the faculty at Minnesota, he earned his PhD in economic sociology at the University of Michigan, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies. He earned his AB from the University of Chicago. 

His research has appeared in leading management and health care journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Medical Care, and Annals of Surgery. His work has received recognition from several different professional societies, including the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Technology and Innovation Management Division and the James D. Thompson Award (honorable mention), given by the American Sociological Association’s section on Organizations, Occupations and Work.

Kai Togami

Kai Togami serves as Senior Director in the area of Global Capability Development to build change management, organizational design, continuous improvement and high performing team alignment capabilities globally across Walmart Stores Inc. We focus first on Communities of Expertise and then on enterprise wide project teams, segments and markets.

He previously led multiple areas of Global Organizational Effectiveness (organizational design, change management and high performing team alignment practices); Survey Strategy; Employment Practices (Performance Management). He was also Sr. Dir. With Human Resource Transformation and directed Walmart Leadership University.

He acted as the head of Organizational Development and Change for the ServiceMaster family of companies assisting with the HR transformation and as Director of ServiceMaster Training University Functions. He was part of launching Six Sigma; the Corporate Training Council; managing executive development programs; special projects and international sales support.

Kai was Vice President of the Learning & OD function of Regional homebuilder – Neumann Homes where he had responsibility for HR practices in areas of recruiting, L&D, performance management and organizational development. He also served five years as an assistant professor and coach at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. 

He has a B.S. from Wheaton College, M.S. in Exercise Science (Biomechanics) from Illinois State University and completed doctoral work in Curriculum and Assessment at Northern Illinois University (ABD). 

Eric Rowlee

Eric Rowlee is currently the Director of Walmart’s Global Organizational Design team.  Eric joined Walmart in January, 2011 as a member of the Global Organizational Effectiveness team, focusing on organizational design, change management and high performing teams. 

Prior to joining Walmart, Eric spent 10 years working for Intel Corp, the world’s leading producer of computer microprocessors.  At Intel Eric worked in the areas of organizational design, change management, associate engagement, conflict resolution and team alignment.  Eric also designed the company’s first global associate opinion survey and managed its worldwide roll-out and administration. 

Eric holds a Bachelors Degree in Psychology from Brigham Young University, a Masters Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Nebraska, and a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from Brigham Young University.  Having lived in South America for several years, Eric is fluent in Spanish.

Conference Chairs

John Joseph

John Joseph is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine.  John’s research lies at the intersection of strategy and organization theory.  His work examines the relationship between organization structures and cognitive processes as it explains the development and changes in the firm’s strategies, products and technologies.  In particular, his work shows the way the organizational structure can improve the quality, novelty and speed of decision making by changing the way managers identify, attend to, and interpret problems and opportunities.  His work also includes studies of strategic planning, resource allocation and corporate governance in large multibusiness firms. 

John’s research has been published or is forthcoming in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Long Range Planning, Advance in Strategic Management, Academy of Management Proceedings and other peer-reviewed publications, and has also developed a number of case studies on strategic decision making.   John is a member of the Academy of Management and Organizational Design Community and serves as an editorial board member of the management field’s top two journals: Administrative Science Quarterly and Strategic Management Journal.

His teaching experience includes full-time, part-time and executive education programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Duke University’s full-time MBA program.  He is a decorated instructor who has received several teaching awards and has taught a variety of courses including strategy, leadership and negotiations.

John’s experience outside academia includes managerial positions in the technology, pharmaceutical and non-profit sectors.   His speaking, research and consulting engagements include: Argyle Executive Forum, British Petroleum, CMO Council, Dart Enterprises, Duke University Hospital, General Electric, Heidrick and Struggles, Kellogg Center for Non-Profit Management, Market-bridge, Motorola and Samsung Electronics.  

Yue Maggie Zhou

Yue Maggie Zhou is an Assistant Professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Maggie's research focuses on the theory of the firm, organization structure and multinational corporations. Her recent studies investigate the role of coordination cost in setting limits to firm growth, the role of organization structure in coordination, interdependence between market positions and global competition. Her work has been published in the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, and Journal of Corporate Finance.

Maggie teaches World Economy at BBA and MBA levels and PhD seminars on Research Methods and International Business. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she taught Microeconomics and International Economics at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor.

Maggie holds a PhD from the University of Michigan where she also earned the Gerald and Lillian Dykstra Fellowship for teaching excellence as a doctoral student. Prior to her academic career, Maggie worked for Arthur Andersen as a financial auditor, and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group as an Investment Officer on privatization transactions in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.