By Kalle Lyytinen
I welcome you to celebrate the 25th anniversary year of our program! This silver jubilee year’s events will culminate in a grand alumni reunion on April 23-25, 2020 and the Engaged Management Scholarship (EMS 2020) conference on September 10-12, 2020. The planning of both events is well on the way and we seek to make them truly memorable and exciting. The reunion will include a publication of a book on the impact of the program thanks to generous donations by some faculty and alumni. It will feature a short history of the program written by all program directors and small vignettes of over 25 alumni about how the program shaped their careers, work and impact, and what great effects this program has had in the world. We will also include several keynotes of well-known academics and practitioners and numerous panels on flourishing, corporate responsibility, big data, research methods, publishing, and so on. The most important element of the event is to strengthen old acquaintances and to build several new ones.
EMS2020 will be co-hosted by our program and the Executive DBA Council (EDBAC), which is the professional organization of executive DBA programs across the globe. We expect approximately 200 alumni, students, faculty and managers to attend this conference, which will focus on research that matters during the era of disruption. CWRU organized and hosted the first DBA conference in 2010 when EDBAC was established (CWRU is the founding member of this organization--the additional members of the original gang of four were Georgia State, Cranfield and Dauphine Paris--so the conference is now returning to its roots.) I hope that you will seriously consider attending the reunion and if possible, also come and experience the EMS. It is a great place to learn and to see how the movement has grown since we started the first interdisciplinary executive doctorate about 25 years ago, and how exceptional our students and alumni are.
We are happy to welcome new faculty to our program. Dr. John Paul Stephens from Organizational Behavior joined the faculty this fall. He is teaching Qualitative Inquiry II (EDMP 641) with the second year students. In the past Dr. Stephens has advised several PhD students on topics related to team behaviors and organizational change. We are happy to have Dr. Stephens on board, as he is a world-class scholar on qualitative and ethnographic methods and on team coordination. He has published in top-level academic journals in this area. We are also lucky to announce that Dr. Roman Sheremeta from the Economics department has promised to take the rein of the course on collective action (EDMP 611) in the fall 2020. In the past, Dr. Sheremeta has advised some DM and PhD who have worked on decision making and game theoretic problems. Dr. Sheremeta is regarded as one of the top economists below age 40 in the world. He has extensive experience in studying mixed conflict/goal decision making and related game theoretic strategies. He is also one of the world’s leading experts in gaming experiments. We hope his knowledge and skills will continue to enrich the methodological arsenal of the whole program. I also want to express my sincere thanks and warm gratitude to Dr. Boland and Dr. Reddy who have taught the qualitative inquiry and the collection action courses, respectively, for so many years and been permanent members of the teaching staff of the program from its inception.
Finally, we have just received the final report from Jagdip Singh of the strategic directions of both programs. This is a long and judicious analysis of the new market place and the opportunities it offers for us as the vanguard of the DBA education and new kinds of management doctoral degrees. It will take time to chew on this rich report, draw and implement its suggestions. But, you will be hearing from us soon and I will report the progress of these changes in the next DM Digest.
Enjoy the fall and coming season.
