Leadership Partners provides its participants with the best professors from the top ten in the nation (#8) Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. School leaders are running complex organizations, and we know from our experience that giving campus and district leaders a CEO mindset helps them lead more effectively.
Dr. Brent Smith Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education, Associate Professor of Management and Psychology (Organizational Behavior)Prior to his current academic appointments, he was a member of the faculty at London Business School and Cornell University where he taught in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Dr. Smith has twice received the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (1998, 2004) and the Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award (2004) for his research on personality, organizational culture, and employee attitudes.
Dr. Steve Klineberg Professor, Department of Sociology and Founding co-Director, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research A graduate of Haverford College, Stephen Klineberg received an M.A. in Psychopathology from the University of Paris and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard. After teaching at Princeton, he joined Rice University’s Sociology Department in 1972. The recipient of twelve major teaching awards, including the George R. Brown Lifetime Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Piper Professor Award, he is a faculty associate and divisional advisor at Lovett College, where he twice served as Interim Master. In March 1982, he and his students initiated the annual “Kinder Institute Houston Area Survey,” now in its 33rd year of tracking the remarkable changes in the demographic patterns, economic outlooks, experiences, and beliefs of Harris County residents. No other metropolitan region in America has been the focus of a long-term longitudinal research program of this scope.
Dr. Eduardo Salas is the Allyn R. & Gladys M. Cline Chair Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Rice University. Previously, he was a trustee chair and Pegasus Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Florida where he also held an appointment as program director for the Human Systems Integration Research Department at the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST). Before joining IST, Eduardo was a senior research psychologist and Head of the Training Technology Development Branch of NAWC-TSD for 15 years. During this period, he served as a principal investigator for numerous R&D programs, including TADMUS, that focused on teamwork, team training, decision-making under stress and performance assessment. Eduardo has co-authored over 450 journal articles & book chapters and has co-edited 27 books. His expertise includes assisting organizations in how to foster teamwork, design and implement team training strategies, facilitate training effectiveness, manage decision making under stress, and develop performance measurement tools.
Dr. Vikas Mital J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management (Marketing) Prior to joining Jones, he was the Thomas Marshall Professor of Marketing at the Katz Graduate School of Management. Dr. Mittal holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Management from Temple University. Before joining Katz, he was on the faculty at Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University. His courses are highly sought after in the MBA as well as the executive education program. He won the excellence in teaching award at the Katz Graduate School three years running, and was voted the best professor by the executives in the 2003- IEMBA program in Brazil. At the Jones School he won the teaching excellence award in 2013 for his teaching in the professional MBA program.
Dr. David Tobin Senior Lecturer in Communication Dr. Tobin joined the full-time faculty of the Jones Graduate School in 2007 after 25 years in the advertising business. Prior to advertising, he taught English at Colorado State University and Emory University after earning a Ph.D. at Princeton. As a copywriter and creative director, first with Ogilvy & Mather for 18 years and then Richards/Carlberg, he worked on multimedia advertising campaigns for clients such as Shell Oil, the Shell MasterCard, IBM, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Houston Chronicle, H-E-B, Central Market, METRO, Child Advocates, the Houston Texans, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He handled everything from writing and co-producing national TV commercials to managing speechwriting duties for C-level executives. He has been a guest speaker at a number of college campuses, from Duke to Texas Tech, on behalf of the New York-based Advertising Educational Foundation.
Dr. Balaji Koka Assistant Professor of Strategic Management He joined the Jones School in 2008 from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He teaches in the Executive MBA and Full-time MBA programs and received the Teaching Excellence Award from the EMBA program in 2014. Professor Koka received his BE from Madurai Kamaraj University in India, his MBA from Indian Institute of Management in India and his Ph.D. in strategic management from the University of Pittsburgh.
