James Fredrickson

Chair, Department of Management Tom E. Nelson Regents Professor of Business Ph.D, University of Washington, 1980 MBA, Wake Forest, 1973 BBA, Wake Forest, 1969 Dr. James W. Fredrickson is the Chair of the Management Department and the Tom E. Nelson, Jr. Regents Professor of Business at the McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. He also served as the School’s first Director of Teaching Development. While at Texas, he has received the Graduate Business Council Teaching Excellence Award (from the MBA students), three Outstanding Professor Awards (from the Executive MBA students), the Jack G. Taylor Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Joe D. Beasley MBA Teaching Award, and the Mahajan Award for Excellence in Executive Teaching (from the faculty), and has been listed in Businessweek as among the best graduate business school teachers in the nation. Fredrickson was also chosen as the Professor of the Year by the Executive MBA students at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Fredrickson has extensive consulting and executive education experience, the majority of which has been on the topics of strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and executive leadership. Clients have included Accor Brasil, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Allstate Insurance, Applied Materials, BBVA (Spain), BMC Software, Banco do Brasil, Chase Manhattan Bank, Club Resorts, Deloitte & Touche, FedEx Kinko’s, GKN (England), Global Marine, GlobalSanteFe, GTE, Gulf States Toyota, HSBC, Halliburton, High End Systems, IBM, La Quinta, Local Insight Media, NationsBank, Rio Tinto (Australia), USX, Tandem Computers, Federal Reserve Bank, Tandy, Vitro, S.A. (Mexico), YPF (Argentina), and M.D. Anderson Cancer Medical Center.

In addition to his consulting and executive education experience, Dr. Fredrickson is known for his research on strategic decision-making, organizational structure, and executive compensation and leadership. His co-authored article, "Are You Sure You Have a Strategy," in the Academy of Management Executive, received that journal's Best Paper Award for 2001. He also conducted a widely-noted world-wide study, Reinventing the CEO. He has published numerous widely cited scholarly articles in leading journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has served on the editorial review boards of the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Science. Dr. Fredrickson was previously on the faculty at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to entering academia he worked at Control Data Corporation and was Director of Strategic Planning at Wake Forest University Medical School.