Jeff Harrison

“My MBA students are just great people. They are well-rounded, honest, smart and hard working. I really respect their level of energy and ambition.”

Professor of Management Dr. Jeff Harrison believes the most important part of his job is teaching, and he has been recognized time and again for the value he places on his students. He is currently the W. David Robbins Chair in Strategic Management and was awarded the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award for his excellence in teaching this year.

This summer Harrison has kept busy with research on accounting for heavily invested stakeholders with colleague Joyce van der Laan Smith, assistant professor of accounting. While he awaits the return of students in the fall, he looks forward to supervising new MBA capstone projects.

“I really love working with MBA students on their capstone projects,” he said. “Choosing a favorite is a little like choosing a favorite child, but one of the most memorable in recent months was Hayes Schildwachter’s capstone with Look Better Than You Feel, a women’s clothing company which supplies, among other items, apparel to women who have undergone mastectomies.  Everything just clicked on that project.” Harrison notes the connection he and Schildwachter made with founder Kim Newlen and her husband, who have since become two of his favorite people.

Harrison also mentions MBA student Logan Tinder’s work with Junior Achievement of Central Virginia. “When I work with such great students on such good causes, it makes me feel like we are really contributing to our community. Capstone projects do so much good for so many people,” he said.

Harrison also teaches a strategy course to MBA students in which writing and analyzing business cases is a large part of the curriculum. “The business world is changing at such a rapid pace that some of what I share with my students will not be relevant in 10 or 20 years,” he said. “I focus on helping them to think about organizations and the broader global business environment differently, hopefully teaching them analytical skills that will be useful to them for the rest of their lives. They should leave having learned to challenge assumptions by asking a lot of ‘why’ questions.”

Many of the business cases written by his students are now or will soon be published on the Robins Case Network, a comprehensive database of cases written by Robins School faculty and students that often lead to publication. “I have already received requests from all over the world from professors and students who want to use our cases,” Harrison said. “This has been a tremendously rewarding experience.”

When he’s not in the classroom, Harrison organized and now serves as the Chair of the Stakeholder Strategy Interest Group of the Strategic Management Society, a large, international group of scholars that is now a permanent part of the Society. In this role he works on stakeholder theory research, some of which has been published in the Strategic Management Journal in collaboration with Doug Bosse, associate professor of management, and Rob Phillips, associate professor of management.