Speakers Bios & Abstracts

Platzhalter Speakers
John-Christopher (JC) Spender
US

Research Professor, Kozminski University
former Dean of the School of Business & Technology
at FIT/SUNY
lecturer, writer

Biography

JC Spender retired as Dean of the School of Business & Technology at FIT/SUNY in 2003. He is now Research Professor at Kozminski University in Warsaw - but holds Visiting Appointments at University of Calabria, Cranfield School of Management, ESADE, Open University Business School, University Campus Suffolk, and is on the faculty of the International School of Management, Paris.

He served in the Royal Navy in experimental submarines, studied engineering at Oxford University, and worked at Rolls-­Royce & Associates on the nuclear power plant for UK submarines. He later worked with IBM (UK) on large banking systems, as a marketing consultant, and then in industrial banking.

Returning to the Manchester Business School (UK), his PhD thesis, published as Industry Recipes: the Nature and Sources of Managerial Judgement (Blackwell, 1989), explored managers‘ uncertainty handling in three different industries. The thesis was awarded the US Academy of Management‘s AT Kearney Prize in 1980.

After several years at City University (London), York University (Toronto), and UCLA he went back into business as Marketing and Strategy VP with Enigma Logic, computer security specialists, now merged into Intel Inc. After 4 years ‚on the road‘ around the world he was appointed Professor at Glasgow University, later at Rutgers as Professor and Chair of Small Business and Enterprise.

In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Lund University School of Economics & Management.

JC has published widely; 8 books, and over 100 journal articles and book chapters.
He was awarded, jointly with Rob Grant (Bocconi U), the 2006 Strategic Management Society‘s Best SMJ Paper prize for the 1996 Special Issue on Knowledge Management.

His most recent books Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford UP 2014) and, with Bruce Strong, Strategic Conversations: Creating and Directing the Entrepreneurial Workforce (Cambridge UP 2014) deal with managing a business‘s creative responses to uncertainty, completing the project begun in his PhD. He continues to research, write and speak about management as the creative art form most essential to sustaining the health and vitality of a democratic capitalist socio-­economy.