I have been teaching strategy for almost 20 years, at Michigan since 2011 and at INSEAD before that. The classroom is where I keep learning which strategy ideas endure, which ones travel well, and which questions need to be asked again because AI has changed the setting.

My basic view is simple: strategy is a way of seeing, not a stockpile of answers. A good course should leave students thinking more clearly about competition, uncertainty, and organizational choice, not just better able to fill in a framework.

Courses

MBA and Executive Programs

• Strategy (Full-Time MBA and Weekend MBA)
• AI & Strategy (Full-Time MBA and Executive MBA)
• World Economy (Full-Time MBA and undergraduate program)

The AI & Strategy syllabus and a recent MBA strategy syllabus give a sense of the questions, cases, and tools I use.

Doctoral Teaching

• Doctoral Seminar in Strategy (PhD seminar)
• Models of Organizational Cognition (PhD seminar)

Syllabi are available here for the Doctoral Seminar in Strategy and Models of Organizational Cognition.

What I Try to Do in the Classroom

• Teach tools for thinking, not scripts for presenting. Strategy frameworks matter because they sharpen how students see a problem, not because they mechanically produce answers.
• Take representations seriously. My work on external representations and mental representations shapes how I teach cases, visuals, and strategic reasoning.
• Be honest about uncertainty. Strategy concerns consequential choices under noisy feedback and delayed consequences. A classroom that hides that fact is not preparing students well.
• Let ideas be tested, not merely stated. Good case discussion surfaces assumptions, trade-offs, and disagreement rather than forcing premature consensus.

Does the Strategy Course Work?

With Mana Heshmati, I studied what happens when MBA students take a core strategy course. In Learning strategic representations, we examined 2,269 MBA students before and after the course and found measurable improvements in decision-making, deeper mental representations, broader attention to industry and competitive dynamics, and a useful combination of greater confidence and greater awareness of uncertainty.

That paper matters to me because it treats teaching as something worth studying seriously, not just doing. A related paper, The effects of artificial intelligence on management education, asks how business schools should change when AI begins to match performance on many of the analytical tasks they teach.

Teaching Materials and Recognition

• Introduction to Strategy (University of Michigan, 2023) is a short introductory volume I use in teaching and share with faculty and graduate students on request.
• Ross named me Researcher of the Year in 2025.
• I was the Last Lecture speaker for the graduating MBA classes in 2022 and 2023, and for the graduating Weekend MBA class in 2026.
• I received the Neary Teaching Excellence Award for the Global MBA Program in 2021 and the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award from 2013 to 2016.

Doctoral Advising

I advise PhD students and serve on doctoral committees in strategy and organization theory. Former students I have advised or co-advised have placed at Washington Foster, UT Austin McCombs, Bocconi, and Wharton. If your interests overlap with the work on the Research page, feel free to write.