New professors join Strathclyde Business School

A number of appointments of senior academic staff have been made across the business school and Strathclyde Business School would like to welcome all new staff members and wish them well.

One of the 'new' staff members is in fact a familiar face to Strathclyde Business School. Professor George Wright returns to SBS to take up a post within the new Department of Strategy and Organisation; he has previously held academic positions at Leeds University Business School, London Business School, Durham Business School and Warwick Business School – but he was also previously at Strathclyde where he held posts of Deputy and Acting Director of what was the then University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business.

Professor Wright researches into the role and quality of management judgment in decision making and in anticipating the future. Are such judgments well-made or are there pitfalls and flaws? In fact, sometimes judgment is flawed and decision aiding techniques - such as scenario thinking and decision analysis can be utilised to improve judgment and decision making.

During his career, Professor Wright has undertaken a wide range of consultancy and workshop-based assignments in scenario thinking and decision analysis. He has also designed and delivered management development workshops on decision making, scenario thinking, and strategic analysis, for a variety of public and private sector organisations across the world. He is currently working at directorate level within the UK Government Department of Health with scenario thinking and Delphi applications, using scenario thinking to aid anticipation of the country's needs for doctors and dentists over the next thirty years.

His books include "Scenario Thinking: Practical Approaches to the Future" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, co-authored), "Decision Analysis for Management Judgment" (4th Edition, Wiley, 2009, co-authored), "Strategic Decision making: A best practice blueprint" (Wiley, 2001), and "The Sixth Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios" (Wiley, 2002, co-authored). He is a member of the adjunct faculty at Mannheim Business School.

He is the Founding Editor of Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and Associate Editor of two forecasting Journals, International Journal of Forecasting and Journal of Forecasting. He is also an Associate Editor of Decision Support Systems. His publications have appeared in a range of US-based management journals, including Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Management Science, and the Strategic Management Journal.

He has edited special issues of Futures, International Journal of Forecasting, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change on the topics of Delphi methodology, scenario methodology, and group-based judgmental forecasting. Since the beginning of 2008, his publications have accumulated about 3500 citations in Google Scholar.

Professor Wright said, "I'm immensely proud to be able to re-join Strathclyde. The ambition and vision of both the University and Business School is to be world-leading in research that has practical applications – and that emphasis and ambition is also my own. I believe that the new Department of Strategy and Organisation will differentiate itself as a centre of excellence in the next few years and I am delighted to work within it."

Joining Professor Wright in the Department of Strategy and Organisation is Professor Harry Sminia. Before joining Strathclyde, Professor Sminia held positions at the University of Groningen, the Vrije Universeit, Amsterdam and the University of Sheffield. His research interests are in the area of processes of strategy formation, strategic change, and competitive positioning.

Professor Sminia has done research on how top management team activity actually affects the strategic direction of a firm, how organisations change, how industries develop, but also how crucial things that take place within an industry remain unaltered over a period of time despite a strong impetus for change. He is also interested in process research methods and methodology.

A new member of staff in the Marketing department is Professor Hong-Wei He, a Professor of Marketing and Management. Before joining Strathclyde, he was an Associate and Assistant Professor of Marketing at Warwick Business School. Professor He is an associate editor of Group & Organization Management.

Professor He does GEM (green, emotional, and moral) research on customer and employee behaviour. "Green" projects relate to green/CSR associations and initiatives, and their impacts on customers and employees. "Emotional" includes research on how emotions affect customer and employee behaviours. "Moral" describes his research on the impacts of moral traits and moral emotions on (un)ethical behaviors. Professor He also does research on the effectiveness of various leadership styles (including ethical, transformational, participative, and paternalistic leadership) at team and CEO levels.

Professor He has published extensively on the above topics in a wide range of academic journals, such as Group & Organization Management, Annals of Tourism Research, British Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, among others. Currently, Prof. He is a co-editor of a special issue in Journal of Organizational Behavior. In the past, Professor He has edited two special issues in two journals: Group & Organization Management and Industrial Marketing Management.

Professor He has supervised numerous consulting projects for commercial companies such as IBM, GE, Ford, and so on, and for non-profit and governmental organisations, including Behaviourial Insights Team of the Cabinet Office and Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS).

Professor Roger Cooke is one of two new professors in the management science department. He received his bachelor degree (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) and PhD from Yale University in mathematics and philosophy. From 1975-2005 he worked in the Netherlands, first as assistant professor in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Amsterdam, later as professor of Applied Decision Theory in the Department of Mathematics at the Delft University of Technology. In 2005 he moved back to the USA as senior fellow at Resources for the Future.

In 2005 Professor Cooke won the Risk Management Oeuvre Award of the Dutch Association for Reliability. In 2006 he served on panels of the National Academy of Science and on NASA's Safety Study Team. In 2006-8 he led a mathematical support team on causal modeling for civil aviation and supervised the development of non-parametric continuous-discrete Bayesian Belief Net software. In 2008 he was contracted by the National Institute for Aerospace to use this modeling tool in analyzing the risk of new Merging and Spacing protocols. Also in 2008 he was elected fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. His short course on Expert Judgment has been given several times at NASA Langley and NASA Headquarters. In 2010 he was named lead author in the 5th assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the chapter on Risk and Uncertainty. In 2011 he received the Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Risk Analysis.

He currently works on uncertainty quantification in conceptual design for AIRBUS and on value of information of Earth Observation Missions for NASA Langley. He consults for expert judgment studies on invasive species (NOAA), food borne diseases (WHO), efficacy of public health measures (Robert Wood Johnson, CDDEP) and nitrogen retention in the Chesapeake Bay.

Professor Alec Morton has also joined management science. He has a BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Manchester and an MSc in Operational Research and PhD in Management Science from the University of Strathclyde. After graduating, he worked for Singapore Airlines and the National University of Singapore, and spent almost 10 years at the London School of Economics, first as lecturer, then as senior lecturer in Management Science. In 2008 he was seconded to the National Audit Office as Visiting Senior Fellow. His main interests are in decision analysis and management science generally, applied to healthcare management and environmental protection. A particular focus in the last few years has been on prioritisation and commissioning of healthcare and he is one of the developers of the STAR toolkit sponsored by the Health Foundation. His recent book Portfolio Decision Analysis with Jeff Keisler and Ahti Salo provides of a review of the current state of the art on applying decision analysis to problems of project prioritisation and portfolio selection.

Professor Morton has been active in the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society, and in the OR Society, where he served as Chair of the Decision Analysis Special Interest Group. He is on the Editorial Board of Decision Analysis and is an Associate Editor for the EURO Journal on Decision Processes and the Transactions of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and has been a grant reviewer for the ESRC and MRC. Past consulting clients include the National Audit Office, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria. His papers have won awards from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research and from the journal Risk Analysis.

The Marketing department welcomes Professor Anne Marie Doherty who joined the Department of Marketing in September having previously held posts at the University of Ulster, Aberystwyth University and the University of South Wales.

Her area of expertise is in international marketing, focusing specifically on the internationalisation of retail firms. She has published on market entry mode strategy, franchising, divestment and consumer behaviour towards international retailers in journals such as the Journal of Business Research, Journal of International Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, International Marketing Review and the Journal of Marketing Management. Her current research themes include the franchise relationship in China, the history of international retailing and the impact of regulation on the progress of retail internationalisation. Her textbook International Retailing is published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Doherty is Associate Editor of both the Journal of Marketing Management and the International Marketing Review. She also sits on the editorial review board of the European Journal of Marketing and has been a recipient of the European Journal of Marketing Outstanding Reviewer of the Year Award. She has edited special issues of the International Marketing Review and the European Journal of Marketing and is currently editing a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

She is a member of the Academy of Marketing Executive Committee, Deputy Chair of the Academy of Marketing Research Committee and was Conference Chair for the Academy of Marketing's 2013 Annual Conference on the theme of 'Marketing Relevance'. She is in her second term of office on the Chartered Institute of Marketing's Academic Senate. Earlier this year she was appointed to the Royal Anniversary Trust's Readers Panel which assesses the Queen's Anniversary Prizes for Further and Higher Education. She is currently co-chair of the Academy of Marketing Special Interest Group on International Marketing.