Sanjiv Das left positions teaching finance at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and the University of California at Berkeley when Santa Clara University offered him academic freedom in 2000.

“They said that as long as I did research, they didn’t care if it was in computer science or finance,” he explains. “at Berkeley, it would have had to be one or the other.”

One of the fruits of the professor’s approach is an elective called Quantitative Business Models that makes extensive use of mathematical software – a first of its kind for a business school.

“I don’t think there’s a course like this at any other campus,” he says. “It aims to remedy the incorrect believe that quantitative models aren’t feasible for students who don’t have engineering backgrounds. I don’t think the QBM course would have been approved at some other places. I would have been accused of encroaching on computer science or the marketing field.”

He has brought that same kind of innovation to Santa Clara, putting together a distinguished group of faculty and advisors to launch the Santa Clara Initiative for Financial Innovation and Risk Management (SCIFIRM). The group, which includes SCU finance faculty George Chacko, Hersh Shefrin, Meir Statman, held its first conference, “The Value of Values” in Spring 2010, and brought together international leaders in the study of socially responsible investing.

“A thought process knows no boundaries,” adds Das, who earned his doctorate in finance from New York University, a master’s degree in computer science from Berkeley, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. It’s hands-on learning, and brings the satisfaction of learning by doing; in my case, learning by teaching.”

Terri Griffith, professor of management in the Leavey School of Business since 2001, virtually immerses herself in research to learn how companies can best function with modifications to the traditional work environment.

Santa Clara’s location in the center of the technological world benefits her, since her research “is focused on the implications and effective use of technologies in organizations.” Griffith, who has served on advisory boards and has won numerous grants, has been looking at virtual work environments since 1984. Today’s business climate and technological advances allow and typically encourage formerly nontraditional communication methods.

“Most organizations are hybrids,” Griffith says. “They do some of their work face-to-face; use teleconferencing; instant messaging, e-mail. My colleagues and I study how that kind of work environment affects the rate of innovation.”

She has learned that “while communication is always easier face-to-face, the actual work outcome can be better in a virtual setting. A project team can pick the best people around the world and perform better.”

Griffith has been a visiting professor at various universities, and has served as senior editor of Organization Science, a research journal.

Through a National Science Foundation grant, Griffith is collaborating with John Sawyer of the University of Delaware to research  “knowledge, innovation, and virtual work” in science and engineering organizations.

“We’ve finished collecting data with a Fortune 100 science and technology company,” Griffith says. “We’ll be able to track how and which teams are more innovative” because of their virtual work environments.

Students in Griffith’s organizational design course at SCU average three to five years of professional experience and most plan to move into management positions at their companies.

“Each individual comes in with their own intuition and experience,” says Griffith, who won the Leavey School of Business Research Award in 2004. “If they are able to hear how others have handled situations, they can understand how to apply their knowledge. They can go back to their organization and apply what you just talked about. Since they have a fair amount of experience, we find a way to organize the knowledge they have.”  

Tammy L. Madsen, Ph.D., had just joined the faculty at Santa Clara when she was tapped in 2000 to be part of the committee helping to plan the new building for the Leavey School of Business.

“Many of us had strong opinions based on our experiences at other universities” she says. “But, ultimately, the challenge was figuring out what we would need 10 to 20 years out.”

Since then, she’s advanced along with the new Lucas Hall, becoming chair of the Management Department in the school in 2007. Madsen, who grew up in Fremont in the Bay Area, was attracted to Santa Clara because she wanted a place that valued research and teaching.

She teaches the required capstone strategy course in the MBA program; the course introduces various strategic analysis frameworks and covers a range of topics such as industry analysis, strategic positioning, alliances, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, and global strategy.

Students engage in an intensive research project where they apply various strategic analysis frameworks and the knowledge and skills they have gained throughout the MBA program to analyze a firm undergoing strategic change. Madsen uses in-depth case analysis and various experiential exercises in her classes. One of her goals is to ensure that students can use class content at their companies.

“Basically, it’s about putting knowledge into action,” says Madsen, who started her career working for a small defense company to analyze F-14 aircraft. She moved on to packaging design and program management for commercial vehicles at Delco Electronics in Santa Barbara, but realized she wanted a different kind of career.

“My exposure to various divisions within General Motors motivated me to pursue a doctorate in strategy and organization,” she says of her move into academics. “I couldn’t help but think that there has to be a better way to run an organization."

"I love my job. I enjoy doing empirical research – exploring questions, collecting data, conducting analysis, and disclosing counterintuitive findings," recounts Madsen. "Many of us are faculty because we enjoy continuously learning and building knowledge.”

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Barry Posner is Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University (located in the heart of Silicon Valley), where he served for 12 years as Dean of the School.

Barry, along with his co-author Jim Kouzes, received the American Society for Training and Development’s highest award for their Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance.  He has been recognized by The International Management Council as one of the nation's top management and leadership educators, listed among the Top 50 Leadership Coaches in America, and recently honored as one of the top dozen “most influential international thinkers in HR.”

He is the co-author of the award-winning and best-selling leadership book The Leadership Challenge. Described as a groundbreaking research study, this book combines keen insights with practical applications and captures both why and how leadership is everyone's business. With over 1.8 million copies in print, this book has been named one of The Top 100 Business Books of All Time, book-of-the-year by the American Council of Health Care Executives, received the Critic's Choice Award from book review editors, and been translated into 20 foreign languages.

The Leadership Practices Inventory has been called "the most reliable, up-to-date leadership instrument available today," and the online version has been completed by over 1.3 million people around the globe over the past four years.  Barry has also co-authored several other award-winning, inspiring and practical books on leadership: The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know; Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It; Encouraging the Heart: A Leaders Guide to Recognizing and Rewarding Others; The Academic Administrator’s Guide to Exemplary Leadership; and A Leader’s Legacy.

Barry is an international renowned scholar who has published more than 90 research and practitioner-oriented articles, in such journals as the: Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Relations, Personnel Psychology, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the like. He is currently on the editorial review boards of the International Journal of Servant-Leadership, Leadership and Organizational Development, and Leadership Review.  Barry serves on the Board of Directors for EMQ Family First.

Barry received an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a master's degree from the Ohio State University in public administration, and his Ph.D. in organizational behavior and administrative theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At Santa Clara he has received the President's Distinguished Faculty Award, the School’s Extraordinary Faculty Award, and several other outstanding teaching and leadership honors. Described as a warm, engaging and pragmatic conference speaker and dynamic workshop facilitator, Barry has worked with such organizations as: Alcoa, Applied Materials, Australian Institute of Management, Charles Schwab, Conference Board of Canada, Hewlett-Packard, Kaiser Permanente Health Care, L.L. Bean, Levi Strauss, Merck, Motorola, NetApp, Trader Joe's, Roche, among others, and been involved with leadership development efforts at more than 35 college campuses.  He has made presentations and conducted workshops across the U.S., and around the globe, from Canada, Mexico and Europe to the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

“There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt.” Audre Lorde, poet

Professor Andy Tsay’s take on Lorde is that the single-minded pursuit of the breakthrough idea may be futile, or at least misguided.

“Novelty is invariably less important than implementation,” he says. “Grand visions are easy, yet most don’t lead to much. But if you take a decent idea and execute the heck out of it, you can have major impact.”

Tsay says this form of competitive advantage is difficult to imitate, as much of the knowledge is unspoken or subtle. That’s why teaching operations management is so important, he says, noting the field’s distinct role in cultivating respect for details and execution.

But successful implementation also requires tremendous creativity, especially in problem solving, Tsay says. For him, this means continuously scanning the world beyond his specialty, taking ideas from one place and using them in another, and fusing existing ideas into new combinations. He’s inspired by the lives of persistently creative people in various pursuits, and has a pet interest in the “one-hit-wonder” phenomenon in popular music.

He views his role as being a ‘portal’ for students into a vast and shifting body of knowledge. “A key part of my job is the management of intellectual property—collecting, organizing, recombining, and retrieving knowledge assets from a myriad of sources,” says Tsay, who is convinced that his systematic procedures for doing this play a major role in his teaching success.

Tsay has taught at the Leavey School since 1995, and is a five-time recipient of the Extraordinary Faculty Award for Teaching, Research and Service, and two-time winner of the Breetwor Fellowship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematical and computational science, his master’s in engineering and his Ph.D. in business, all at Stanford University.