Author: Mary Grace Neville

I teach, practice, and research positive change, especially as it occurs through people in business (and therefore in business education!) acting as agents of world benefit. My formal training includes a strategic management MBA, organizational behavior PhD, and extensive study in Gestalt psychology; while my professional experiential learning spans non-profit administration, corporate change-strategy consulting, and higher education. What does all of that mean? It means I carry passion for making our highly interdependent and global world a better place. Because businesses shape so much about our choices and priorities and values, I focus on shifting how business happens. Specifically, I teach undergraduates business from the belief that everyone carries responsibility for engaging in making business actions responsible (meaning, analytical yes, but also meaning compassionate and heart filled too). I advocate that we are all better off when each of us learns to imagine, to honor each other even in disagreement, to ask questions and to hold ideas lightly enough that the ideas can grow. This requires diverse skills -- leading, following, inquiring, listening, analyzing, reflecting from multiple perspectives, scaling ideas in like a microscope and out like a telescope to explore implications, seeking to understand oneself as well as others, imagining, building, redesigning, etc. That's much more to learn than just what's written in a text book! Business can be a great lever for positive change. But many are overly focused on quick routes to short-term financial profit maximization. Businesses can also do "good" while doing financially well -- the concepts can co-exist. But we need large scale consciousness change in order for that positive influence to become mainstream. I teach because doing so allows me to build relationships with leaders (both the future's "big L" leaders who will be in charge of businesses, and the "little l" leaders who shape our daily life simply because they influence others as they make their own choices and moral actions). Rather than try to change giant, amorphous entities (like an entire multinational corporation all at once), I choose to work with individuals to change and expand how individuals conceptualize business and success. Together, individuals ultimately ripple out to change large scale beliefs over time. Managing our lives in generative ways -- ways that foster growth in collective well being, innovation for societal improvement, and imagination of our most hopeful futures -- we make a positive difference, step by step. I hope you'll make this true in your own life!

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