Stephan Liozu: DM Blog

In 2008, I decided to pursue a doctoral degree and started investigating the educational programs that would allow me to stay employed fulltime while attending a top-notch academic program. I discovered a variety of traditional, online and hybrid doctoral programs aimed at busy professionals. I evaluated all of them and quickly narrowed my options to three. Out of the five programs that made the cut, I decided to apply to three of them and got accepted in two. Then I had to make the final choice. And that is a choice that I will never regret now that I have graduated and successfully transformed my life. I selected the Doctor of Management program at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) because of its strong and unmatched value proposition. Let me discuss that further:

1. Busy professionals represent a very attractive target for educational institutions. Programs are popping up every year offering new EDBA’s and EDB’s for example. The DM program at CWRU have existed for over 18 years and hundreds of graduates have successfully completed the programs, have published papers and books, and are still very active in conducting academic research. The longevity of the DM program meant for me that I could contact alumni to get support and guidance as well as to build on some of the work they published. It provided a sense of comfort to know that over 150 people graduated from this prestigious institution! Going to alumni reunion is a real pleasure. We are a family and I truly enjoy reconnecting with all of them.
2. The DM program is a management program with a focus on design and sustainable systems. As such, the program is not aimed at studying or solving business problems. The program exists to conduct human- and organization-centered research solidly anchored in the practice of engaged scholarship. After 20 years in business, the last thing I wanted to do is to study business. I wanted to learn more about management and design theories so that I could continue my personal transformational journey. And so I did! I finally was able to learn a lot about how human beings and organizations operate. I could connect the dots between my strong business experience and management theories. It suddenly made sense!
3. The DM program creates practitioner-scholars in their respective field of research. The program is set-up to embrace the reality of managerial practices with the robustness of academic research. I never knew I could write. The program taught me to write for both practitioners and scholarly outlets. Over the past 5 years, I am privileged to have published over 30 papers and am working on my third book. Who would have thought? I was the king of bullet points! Now I cannot stop writing.
4. The DM program offers a blend of content classes (leadership, design, culture & politics for example) and research classes aimed at raising the participants’ intellectual capital as well as developing best-in-class researchers. I was personally enriched by learning the foundation of design theory going back to great philosophers. I was able to interact with some of the best thinkers in the field of value, design, organization behaviors, and management. I also learned by the peers in my cohort. The variety of research topics and the class interactions allowed me to learn from various fields of research.
5. Lastly, having graduated from the program, I can tell now that this was a personal and humantransformational process. The DM program changed my life. First, I made lifetime friendships with my cohort peers as well as with staff and faculty. Second, I am not the same person in 2014 that I was in 2009 when I joined the program. I am more curious, more interested in building good arguments, more fascinated by the power of good research. Third, I have decided to leave the corporate world to pursue a career in writing, teaching and researching. This is what I love and the program equiped me to be able to do it and make a living while doing it. Finally, learning about mindfulness, design, love, and human interactions made me a better person. I aim to make a difference in the world by educating others. I am also a better father to my son, Lorenzo, who now sees more of me.

If you are in the market for a doctoral program, I strongly encourage you to consider the Doctorate of Management program at CWRU. Talk to students, to alumni and visit the school. You will quickly discover the strength of its value proposition. There is no other program like it. Contact me atsliozu@case.edu if you wish to learn more about my experience and how it changed my life.

Stephan Liozu, PhD
PhD in Management: Designing Sustainable Systems Class of 2013
Weatherhead School of Management
Case Western Reserve University

Stephan Liozu: Managing Complexity in Value and Pricing Management

Pricing is a complex process (Monroe, 1990; Nagle & Holden, 2002). Many industry managers consider pricing a headache and many firms have “thrown in the towel” on pricing. They complain that they have no control over prices since “the market sets the price and (they) have to figure out how to cope with it” (Dolan & Simon, 1996). Lancioni et al. (2005)proposed that pricing strategy has implications for stakeholders both within and outside the firm. For them, pricing is a difficult and complex process due to the plethora of internal and external economic and political influences that shape the firm’s pricing decisions. The tasks of price setting and implementation have numerous implications throughout the organization. These tasks involve “multidimensional processes affecting customers, products, cost recovery efforts, produce margin levels, customer retention, market share, and domestic and international sales” (Lancioni, et al., 2005, p. 125).

So what makes pricing so complex? Can pricing management be considered as a complex system? How do firms manage the complexity generated by the multidimensionality and multileveledness?

Our research work in the area of pricing management led us to conclude that one of the critical elements of the organizational journey towards pricing excellence is the organization capacity to change. Moving from a formula-based pricing orientation to a customer-value orientation requires deep changes and an overall organizational mobilization to achieve desired goals (Liozu, Boland, Hinterhuber, & Perelli, June 2011). This combination of change and complexity dimensions in pricing led us to the work of Richard Boyatzis and especially his 2006 paper on Intentional Change Theory from a complexity perspective.

Boyatzis refers to complex systems as “multi-level combination of systems that may behave in a way independent of any one of the component systems” (Boyatzis, 2006, p. 608). Later in his paper, he explores the aspect of his change theory that makes it a truly complex system: its multileveledness. We adopt these dimensions of system combination and multileveledness and apply to pricing management in organizations. We actually go one step further by stating that pricing is much more complex than that. Our figure below paints a complex picture. Complexity in pricing management is nested at various levels across multiple dimensions and cultures, and requires the convergence of multiple languages. Complexity is the result of complex interactions between internal sub-systems (functions and departments) exposed to the internal/external on-going opposition.

We conjecture that pricing management is multi-functional, multi-dimensional, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-leveled. Pricing requires the careful management of the multitude of agents involved in pricing decisions and the plethora of information that need to be consider to set price levels. Because all agents and actors act independently, tensions, conflicts, misunderstandings, difficult negotiations, and internal arguments are part of this complex price setting process. There is plenty of room for failure, for poor decision making and for break downs in the process. That is may be why most managers “throw in the towel”. 

Stephan Liozu is President & CEO of Ardex America Inc (www.ardexamericas.com), an innovative and high-performance building-materials company located in Pittsburgh, PA. He is also a PhD candidate in Management at Case Western Reserve University and can be reached atsliozu@case.edu.

Stephan Liozu Studies the Disconnect between Research and Practice of Value-Based Pricing Orientations

There are three common orientations for setting prices: cost-based, competition-based, or value-based. Academics have long extolled the virtues of value-based pricing, but practitioners continue to focus primarily on cost or competition based practices.  There is a major disconnect here.  Industrial pricing is a ‘problem of practice' desperate for the help of a practioner-scholar.

Enter Stephan Liozu (DM 2012).  Through his work with theWeatherhead DM program, Stephan is investigating why this disconnect between research and practice exists and what it means, and he's starting to get some answers.  Liouzu indicates that the adoption of value-based pricing is not as straightforward in practice as one might think.  A shift to value-based pricing is often challenging for organizations to implement, in part due to the limits of human interpretation.  Value-related issues are "difficult to define, conceptualize and measure" and the adoption of value-based pricing requires more than just a simple decision on the part of a manger, but often "requires an organizational transformation." 

Stephan was a keynote speaker for the Professional Pricing Society's Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago on May 7, 2010. His one-hour presentation "Pricing Orientation in Business Markets: Gap between Theory and Practice" focused on the problem of practice in the area of the adoption of value-based pricing in small and medium industrial firms. This work was based on his first-year work in the DM program.

According to Stephan, "I came in the program with some basic idea of what my research interest was. The first year of the program was a challenging and rich journey... The DM program is intellectually powerful and enriching from the get go. A year into the program, I realize how much I have accomplished with the support from great advisors and faculty. Presenting my first paper in Chicago in May 2010 as a practitioner scholar confirmed the novelty and relevance of my research project. This program has awakened my interest in academic research that is grounded in practice and interdisciplinary in nature."

Stephan is President & CEO of Ardex / W.W. Henry Company, a manufacturer of high performance building products. Stephan has masters degrees from Institut d'Administration des Entreprises and Cleveland State University, and has also completed Harvard Business School's General Management Training Program. He is a visiting professor with the Unversite Toulouse, where he teaches international business-to-business pricing strategies.