World-class Professors

W. Earl Sasser, Harvard Business School

Baker Foundation Professor

W. Earl Sasser is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, Usa and has been a member of the faculty there since 1969. Sasser developed the School’s first course on the management of service operations in 1972. Professor Sasser has taught a variety of courses in the MBA program including Production and Operations Management, Decision Making and Ethical Values, The Operating Manager, and Service Management.
Sasser is the past faculty chair of executive education’s Program for Leadership Development [PLD]—a program for which he served as the principal architect in 2004. He presently teaches in the Owner/President Management Program and serves as faculty chair of several week-long leadership programs. Professor Sasser serves as a consultant to a number of companies in North America, Asia and Europe.

Rory McDonald, Darden Business School

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Rory McDonald is Associate Professor of Business Administration at Darden Business School, Virginia, where he teaches “Disruptive Strategy: Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.” He was formally an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
McDonald was named one of the world’s top 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets and Quants, and his article “What is Disruptive Innovation?” was named as one of Harvard Business Review’s Definitive Management Ideas. He is the co-author (along with Christopher Bingham) of the recent book, “Productive Tensions: How Every Leader Can Tackle Innovation’s Toughest Trade-Offs,” (MIT Press).

Professor McDonald’s research focuses on how firms compete and innovate effectively in new technology-enabled markets. Drawing on a mix of in-depth fieldwork and archival data, he studies how executives develop viable strategies in these contexts and how they obtain resources that improve their chances of success. For his research, he was named the Past Chairs’ Emerging Scholar by the Academy of Management (Technology and Innovation Management Division) and received both a Kauffman Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship in Entrepreneurship as well as the Kauffman Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. He was also a finalist for best dissertation award in business policy and strategy by the Academy of Management.

Professor McDonald received his PhD in Management Science and Engineering from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. He also holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an MA in economic sociology from Stanford University, as well as two engineering degrees from the University of South Florida. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin where he received the CBA Foundation Teaching award. McDonald is on the board of YCG Funds, an Austin-based mutual fund company, and is an advisor to several startups.

Gautam Makunda, Yale School of Management

Professor of Management

Gautam Mukunda is a Professor at the Yale School of Management. Before that he was an Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership & Assistant Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Unit of Harvard Business School. He has written his first book “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” which has been published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Before joining the business school he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in Political Science and an A.B. in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. His research focuses on leadership, international relations, and the social and political implications of technological change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and MIT’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies.

Before graduate school he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector. He is Founding Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on applying insights from academia to private and public sector problems. He is on the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, and a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly. He has published articles on leadership, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology in Security Studies, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, Systems and Synthetic Biology, and the Washington Post.

Julia Prats, IESE Business School

Professor of Entrepreneurship

Mª Julia Prats is Professor and head of department of Entrepreneurship, and holder of the Bertrán Foundation Chair of Entrepreneurship at IESE.

Prof. Prats’s primary area of interest is the entrepreneurial process, which includes the identification, evaluation and implementation of opportunities in any context. Central to this work is developing strategies and systems that help established firms achieve profitable growth. Her second work stream focuses on understanding the key factors in building and managing professional service firms. Over the years she has had the opportunity to develop both areas of interest through teaching, research projects and consulting work.

She holds a DBA in business administration from Harvard University, an MBA from IESE Business School, and a degree in industrial engineering from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. She has taught at Wharton Business School, IPADE in México, INALDE in Colombia, and AESE in Portugal.

Julian Sánchez, IPADE Business School

Professor of Management Control and Information

Professor Sánchez is professor of the Department of Managerial Control and Information and a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee at IPADE Business School in Mexico. He is a consultant in business management, specialising in control, costs and information systems.
Sánchez’s main areas of interest are control systems, cost systems, budgeting, project control, evaluation of incentive programmes and fraud. Professor Sánchez is a guest professor at several business schools: San Telmo in Spain, IAE in Argentina and Tayasal in Guatemala. He was a founder partner of Control e Información Directiva SC and was CEO of Grupo Tissier and Quality Control Manager at Siemens Erlangen, Germany as well as General Manager and Director for several other companies.

Luis Huete, IESE Business School

Professor of Production and Operations Management

Luis Huete is Professor of Production and Operations Management at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain since 1982. He also taught in the Harvard Business School programs Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management and has been a regular visiting professor in programs at ESMT (Germany), ISEM Fashion Business School (Spain), Lovaine (Belgium) and Deusto Business School (Spain), as well as other renowned business schools. He also collaborates with Bupa (United Kingdom), ISS (Denmark), Omnicom (United States) and Telefónica (Spain), among others.

He is a member of the boards of directors of Six Senses Luxury Resorts & Spas (Thailand), Altia Consultores, Corporación Financiera ARCO and Ecointegral, among others. He also sits on the advisory boards of Oxford Leadership Academy (United Kingdom), IBS (Mexico), VipScan (Madrid) and Abypersonalize (Madrid), and is a patron of the NMAC Contemporary Art Foundation.The journal Actualidad Económica has recognized him three times in its ranking of the 100 best business ideas of the year. According to the Institute for International Research, three out of four managers consider him the best guru in Spanish management, and the publication Who’s Who in Spanish Management described him as one of the most influential figures in the field.

Joe Pons, San Telmo International Institute

Professor of Management Practice

Dr. Joe M. Pons was Marketing Professor at IESE International Graduate School of Management in Barcelona for 14 years. Currently, his regular teaching assignments include being a Visiting Professor at the IEDC - Bled School of Management. He also lectures at IAE in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Instituto Internacional San Telmo in Seville, Spain and participates in Seminars organised by efmd and CEEMAN for business school academics.
Pons founded and is currently President of AXIOMA Marketing Consultants, a firm specialising in strategic marketing projects as well as in the training and executive development aspects that usually go hand in hand with Customer Orientation activities. His current consulting engagements focus on alligning sales and marketing organisations to shifting strategic priorities, improving interfunctional coordination as a mechanism towards greater market orientation as well as international market selection criteria.