prof. Sim B. Sitkin, PhD. – Duke University

 Lecture date: May 22-23, 2017

Sitkin

 

Tentative lecture topic

Paradox of Individual vs. Collective Value-Creation Strategies

 

Curriculum Vitae:

Professor Sitkin is a professor of Management, Director of the Fuqua Center on Leadership and Ethics and Director of the Behavioral Science and Policy Center at Duke University. He served as Area Head for the Management and Organizations Department, Faculty Director of Fuqua’s Health Sector Management Program, and Staudenmeyer Research Fellow. Prof. Sitkin has also been Academic Director at the Duke Corporate Education and on the faculty of University of Texas at Austin and the Free University of Amsterdam. He is a Founding Partner of Delta Leadership, Inc. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management in 2010 and the Society for Organizational Behavior in 2013.

Professor Sitkin’s research focuses on leadership and control systems, and their influence on how organizations and their members become more or less capable of change and innovation. He is widely known for his research on the effect of formal and informal organizational control systems and leadership on risk taking, accountability, trust, learning, M&A processes, and innovation. His research has appeared in such publications as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, and Organization Science. His most recent book is Organizational Control (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is one of only two individuals to have won Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management Review (the top ranked management journal).

He has extensive consulting and executive education experience with corporations, non-profits, and government organizations worldwide (including ABB, Alcoa, American Airlines, Areva, Baker Tilly, bioMerieux, Carolina Power & Light, Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, Corning, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Duke Medical Center, Ericsson, Glaxo, Hart Graphics, IBM, La Quinta, Maxcor, Omgeo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Red Hat Software, R.H. Donnelley, Siemens, State Farm Insurance, URS, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Xerox Corporation, and Xiamen Health System). In his work, he has focused on strategic leadership, leading and managing change (including mergers and acquisitions), organizational learning and knowledge management, and the design of organizational control systems.

 

Lecture:

Since long-term survival of firms implies a necessity for strategic turnarounds, increasingly the key value lies within the firm’s best employees (at all levels of decision-making). Thus, the lecture focuses on understanding key principles of selecting and developing top talents (both as specialist and as generalists) in order to acquire and develop capabilities necessary for balancing explorative and exploitative activities of the firm. Prof. Sitkin will closely focus on the concept of trust/distrust as the key element to getting great people to share great ideas thus enhancing individuals’ and organizational innovation potentials. While one can motivate for predictable efforts, value creation through innovation implies importance of managing emotion and trust.