Fall 2023 Teaching

Teamwork & Leading Organizations
Open to Online MBA Students

Skillfully contributing to, building, and leading collaborative efforts—from small project-based teams to larger functions and divisions—will enable you to have an impact throughout your career. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of interpersonal skills and systems thinking that will enable you to differentiate yourself as a valued-adding member and leader of organizations. The specific learning objectives for this course are to:

  • Develop your skills as a contributor to and leader of project-based teams. This includes sharpening your understanding of the core elements of team design and how leaders and team members alike can promote effective team processes.
  • Develop your skills as a leader in and of organizations. This comprises being able to architect a system—its structure, work design, culture, and people management practices—to execute a given strategy, within a given environment.

At the conclusion of this course, you will be able to independently transfer your learning to:

  • design, launch, and lead project-based teams in a manner that (a) meets or exceeds stakeholder’s expectations for task performance; (b) contributes to the growth of individual team members; and, (c) leaves team members willing to work together again in the future;
  • systematically analyze an organization’s architecture, assessing its internal congruence and its utility for executing a given strategic approach, either when engaged in early organizational design (e.g., scaling a start-up team) or when diagnosing the reasons for unsatisfactory organizational performance.

Organizational Behavior
Open to PMBA Students

Skillfully contributing to, leading, and building teams will enable you to have an impact throughout your career—from a front-line position all the way to the C-suite. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of interpersonal skills that will enable you to differentiate yourself as an effective leader and member in team-based work environments. The specific learning objectives for the course are:

  • Develop your skills as a leader of project-based teams. This includes sharpening your understanding of critical elements of team design, as well as leader behaviors that enable learning in project-based teams over time.
  • Enhance your capacity to make valuable contributions as a member of project-based teams. This includes understanding how to integrate diverse perspectives and overcome socioemotional and relational barriers to team effectiveness.

Summer 2022 Courses

Foundations of Impactful Teamwork
Open to Full-Time MBA Students

Skillfully contributing to, leading, and building teams will enable you to have an impact throughout your career—from a front-line position all the way to the C-suite. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of interpersonal skills that will enable you to differentiate yourself as an effective leader and member in team-based work environments. The specific learning objectives for the course are:

  • Develop your skills as a leader of project-based teams. This includes sharpening your understanding of critical elements of team design, as well as leader behaviors that enable learning in project-based teams over time.
  • Enhance your capacity to make valuable contributions as a member of project-based teams. This includes understanding how to integrate diverse perspectives and overcome socioemotional and relational barriers to team effectiveness.
  • Develop a systems view of organizations, which envisions the interconnected parts of an organization (e.g., people, roles, teams, divisions) as the machinery that enables it to execute a given strategy within a given overarching environment (e.g., societal, industry).
  • Advance your skills as a leader of organizations. This involves seeing how, with a given strategy in mind, leaders act as architects of organizational systems, shaping their formal (e.g., structure, personnel practices, policies) and informal (e.g., norms, routines, culture) elements.

Spring 2022 Courses

People Metrics
Open to BSBA, MBA, PMBA, & SMP Students

Metrics are at the core of people analytics. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the    foundations of assessing people in organizations, particularly through the use of novel measurement technologies. Through out-of-class preparation, in-class discussions, and real-world applications, this course will enable you to add value to organizations as a developer of new metrics and as a critical consumer of existing metrics. After taking this course, you will be able to:

  • Develop a clear and logical conceptual measurement model to assess a given construct. A conceptual measurement model is the foundation of creating novel and useful new approaches for assessing individual attitudes and characteristics (e.g., personality, intelligence, well-being, engagement) and interpersonal characteristics and behavior (e.g., knowledge sharing, inclusion, teamwork).
  • Scrutinize the quality of measures and measurement approaches. By understanding the principles of good measurement, you will be able to critically assess the quality of measures being applied to you (e.g., your performance) and the value of new potential measures.
  • Understand the use of novel technologies for assessing people in organizations. Organizations and, more generally, society are awash in the traces of individual behavior and social interactions. Decoding how data that already exist in an organization can be used to understand behavior is an essential skill for adding value in the field of people analytics.
  • Think critically about how to put new measures into practice in organizations. Because what gets measured gets attention, metrics are often among the most politically-charged phenomena in organizations. To have impact by developing a new measure, it is necessary to be skilled in implementing it and communicating its value within an organizational context.

Teamwork & Leading Organizations
Open to Online MBA Students

Skillfully contributing to, building, and leading collaborative efforts—from small project-based teams to larger functions and divisions—will enable you to have an impact throughout your career. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of interpersonal skills and systems thinking that will enable you to differentiate yourself as a valued-adding member and leader of organizations. The specific learning objectives for this course are to:

  • Develop your skills as a contributor to and leader of project-based teams. This includes sharpening your understanding of the core elements of team design and how leaders and team members alike can promote effective team processes.
  • Develop your skills as a leader in and of organizations. This comprises being able to architect a system—its structure, work design, culture, and people management practices—to execute a given strategy, within a given environment.

At the conclusion of this course, you will be able to independently transfer your learning to:

  • design, launch, and lead project-based teams in a manner that (a) meets or exceeds stakeholder’s expectations for task performance; (b) contributes to the growth of individual team members; and, (c) leaves team members willing to work together again in the future;
  • systematically analyze an organization’s architecture, assessing its internal congruence and its utility for executing a given strategic approach, either when engaged in early organizational design (e.g., scaling a start-up team) or when diagnosing the reasons for unsatisfactory organizational performance.

Summer 2021 Courses

Foundations of Impactful Teamwork
Open to Full-Time MBA Students

Skillfully contributing to, leading, and building teams will enable you to have an impact throughout your career—from a front-line position all the way to the C-suite. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of interpersonal skills that will enable you to differentiate yourself as an effective leader and member in team-based work environments. The specific learning objectives for the course are:

  • Develop your skills as a leader of project-based teams. This includes sharpening your understanding of critical elements of team design, as well as leader behaviors that enable learning in project-based teams over time.
  • Enhance your capacity to make valuable contributions as a member of project-based teams. This includes understanding how to integrate diverse perspectives and overcome socioemotional and relational barriers to team effectiveness.
  • Develop a systems view of organizations, which envisions the interconnected parts of an organization (e.g., people, roles, teams, divisions) as the machinery that enables it to execute a given strategy within a given overarching environment (e.g., societal, industry).
  • Advance your skills as a leader of organizations. This involves seeing how, with a given strategy in mind, leaders act as architects of organizational systems, shaping their formal (e.g., structure, personnel practices, policies) and informal (e.g., norms, routines, culture) elements.

How to download YouTube videos

As a professor, I frequently use YouTube videos (and other streaming videos) in my courses. For a variety of reasons, I do not want to stream the video during a given class session. For example, if I am teaching a session virtually on Zoom, I do not want to simultaneously download and upload the video. Additionally, if I am teaching a course in China, I may not have access to YouTube. Finally, YouTube videos sometimes disappear, are blocked, or have advertisements that I don’t want to play in class.

For all of these reasons, I almost always download YouTube videos before class sessions and play them through my local machine. I never stream them directly from YouTube.

While there are a range of semi-functional browser plug-ins for downloading YouTube videos, I have never been satisfied with them. Instead, I use a command line tool — youtube-dl–for pulling videos from YouTube. It is an outstanding piece of (free) software that will enable you to quickly pull down videos to include in your classes.

The best way to install youtube-dl, if you’re on a Mac, is to use Homebrew. After doing so, you can run the following command in your shell (replacing {url} with the website address of the video you want to download:


youtube-dl "{url}"

For example, the following command would pull down an *amazing* video about recurrence analysis 🙂


youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKOd45GLY9Y"

There are so many other options for this software. I think this is a particularly useful guide to using youtube-dl.

Spring 2021 Courses

Leadership Development
Open to Executive MBA (Shanghai) Students

If there is one topic that spans across all areas of business—from accounting and finance to marketing and logistics (and, of course, people management)—it is leadership. Leadership is often implicated as the key factor that drives either the success or failure of an organization. And, accordingly, the factors that drive effective leadership have been the focus of a considerable amount of attention from researchers, businesspeople, and popular press commentators. Yet, despite the volume of interest in this topic, it often seems mysterious. People hold widely varying views about what makes someone an effective leader, what behaviors constitute effective leadership, and even the very concept of leadership effectiveness. That is, what does it mean for someone to be “effective” as a leader?

The purpose of this course is to resolve ambiguity about the meaning and drivers of leadership effectiveness. By doing so, this course will contribute to your capacity to exhibit effective leadership and your ability to coach and mentor others to lead more effectively. After taking this course, you will be able to:

  • …identify the individual attributes, processes of attribution, and situational/contextual factors that shape views of someone’s leadership style and effectiveness—including your own.
  • …understand how leaders act as architects to influence organizations by shaping their formal design and informal culture. You will thus be able to analyze your own organization’s formal design and informal culture to critically evaluate its alignment with strategic priorities and with your own leadership approaches.
  • …articulate how leaders act as enablers of others’ action by directing people’s investment of time, effort, and energy into specific goals and objectives. Accordingly, you will have an enhanced understanding of how your own leadership style and interactions with others influence their motivation.
  • … envision how leaders serve as agents of reorientation, proactively altering an organization’s architecture and their own behavior in response to environmental changes or strategic shifts. Turning inward, you will be able to critically assess opportunities to adjust your own organization to enhance its effectiveness.

People Metrics
Open to BSBA, MBA, and Specialized Masters Students

Metrics are at the core of people analytics. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the foundations of assessing behavior in organizations using novel measurement approaches and large datasets. Through classroom discussions and real-world applications, this course will enable you to add value to organizations through the development, use, and interpretation of innovative people metrics. Specifically, after taking this course, you will be able to:

  • Develop a clear and logical conceptual measurement model. A conceptual measurement model is the foundation of creating novel and useful new approaches for assessing intrapersonal characteristics (e.g., personality) and interpersonal behavior (e.g., knowledge sharing, teamwork).
  • Identify novel sources of data for innovative people metrics. Organizations are awash in the traces of individual behavior and social interactions. Decoding how data that already exist in an organization can be used to understand behavior is an essential skill for adding value in the field of people analytics.
  • Apply a rigorous process for validating new people metrics. Developing a measurement model and finding sources of data are necessary, but insufficient for adding value through people metrics. New measures must be validated.

Fall 2020 Courses

Foundations of Impactful Teamwork
Required Course for 1st Year MBA Students

Working effectively in and leading teams are essential competencies in modern organizations, both large and small. The purpose of this course is to lay a foundation of knowledge and skills that will enable you to differentiate yourself as an effective leader and member of impactful teams. The specific learning objectives for this course include:

  • Be able to launch and lead goal-directed project teams that meet or exceed stakeholders’ expectations for task performance, provide a positive working experience for team members, and enable team members to grow as a unit and as individuals.
  • Be able to diagnose common interpersonal challenges that arise in teams composed of diverse individuals who are working under pressure and relying heavily on virtual modes of collaboration.
  • Refine your awareness of your strengths and weaknesses as a leader and develop a plan for honing your leadership identity and interpersonal skills during your MBA program.
  • Augment your resourcefulness when working in a global virtual team.

Organizational Research Methods
Doctoral Course

The purpose of this course is to expose you to a range of methods for conducting research on organizations. We will do this through readings, class discussions and exercises, as well as through writing and reviewing one another’s work. Because this is a survey course, we will cover a range of topics and specific research methods. The objectives of the course are:

  • Introduce you to general concepts of methodological rigor and the core foundations of measurement.
  • Enhance your understanding of the suite of methods commonly used in organizational research.
  • Improve your skill in critically consuming research from a variety of methodological approaches.

Spring 2020 Courses

People Metrics
Open to BSBA, MBA, and Specialized Masters students

Metrics are at the core of people analytics. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the foundations of assessing behavior in organizations using novel measurement approaches and large datasets. Through classroom discussions and real-world applications, this course will enable you to add value to organizations through the development, use, and interpretation of innovative people metrics. Specifically, after taking this course, you will be able to:

  • Develop a clear and logical conceptual measurement model. A conceptual measurement model is the foundation of creating novel and useful new approaches for assessing intrapersonal characteristics (e.g., personality) and interpersonal behavior (e.g., knowledge sharing, teamwork).
  • Identify novel sources of data for innovative people metrics. Organizations are awash in the traces of individual behavior and social interactions. Decoding how data that already exist in an organization can be used to understand behavior is an essential skill for adding value in the field of people analytics.
  • Apply a rigorous process for validating new people metrics. Developing a measurement model and finding sources of data are necessary, but insufficient for adding value through people metrics. New measures must be validated.