Robert M. (Bob) McCann has been creating, directing and teaching leadership and management communication courses across virtually all of UCLA Anderson’s MBA degree programs since coming to UCLA in 2010. He also teaches courses that include: Entrepreneurship; Global Leadership; Persuasion & Leadership; Leading & Doing Business in Thailand; and Doing Business in Southeast Asia in Anderson’s FEMBA, EMBA and full-time MBA programs.

Concurrently he is deeply engaged in many of UCLA Anderson’s executive education programs and annually teaches undergraduate classes in communication, global leadership and entrepreneurship at the University of Hong Kong.

Head of an active consulting business, McCann specializes in the training of executives and professionals in persuasion, leadership, workplace diversity and all aspects of the strategic use of communication in business settings. Some of the companies for which he has provided service include: Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Fox Entertainment Group, Marriott International, Johnson & Johnson Health Care, MTR (Hong Kong), CUHK (Hong Kong), UCLA Hospital, College Board, Pfizer, Novartis, Nestlé and Schering-Plough.

McCann’s research interests, which include workplace ageism, leadership, intergroup communication, cross-cultural communication and age diversity, can be traced back to his father, who at age 92 continues to put in 40-hour weeks as an executive in the printing industry. “My father is not alone,” McCann says. “Either by choice or necessity, older individuals around the world are working well into their so-called retirement years in numbers greater than ever before. And they are thriving. My dad and other such workers are the inspiration for my research on older workers.”

The research McCann conducts is relevant to pressing societal issues and has strong practical implications. Some of his recent work on the communicative dimensions of age biases was recently utilized in a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief on age discrimination. He has also served as principal investigator on UCLA’s multiyear Center for International Business and Education Research (CIBER) grant.

McCann’s work has been published in several major refereed communication journals and has won numerous research awards. For more than a decade, he has served on the executive editorial board of the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. His latest book, titled Ageism at Work: The Role of Communication in a Changing Workplace, is available in Spanish, Catalan and English.

A frequent media consultant in the areas of management communication, leadership, workplace ageism and age diversified workplaces, McCann has appeared on National Public Radio and in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, US News and World Report, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, GQ, Esquire, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Capital Times and International Herald Tribune.

McCann lived in Asia for nearly 20 years, most of which were spent in Thailand, where he worked both in academia (at the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University) and in the private sector, where he helped spearhead Diageo’s relationship marketing efforts in Asia for the Johnnie Walker line of products. He also worked in international banking in Karachi, Pakistan, and London, England.

At present McCann holds the chair of the UCLA Thailand Executive Committee and serves on the faculty advisory committee of UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. He is the former associate dean for global initiatives at UCLA Anderson.

McCann has received several teaching awards and dean’s commendations around the globe, including the prestigious “Golden Apple” Teaching Award at USC, one of his former institutions. This honor is bestowed by USC Marshall’s full-time, first-year MBA class on its favorite professors

Professor of Management and Organizations Corinne Bendersky is an expert in workplace conflict, status and justice in teams and organizations. Bendersky’s research resonates in constructive and concrete ways both in academe and business.

Bendersky teaches in UCLA Anderson’s full-time and fully employed MBA programs, and in many of its executive education programs. As faculty director of the human resources roundtable known as HARRT, Bendersky engages with a mix of academic, consultant and practitioner knowledge of cutting-edge human resources topics with the roughly 50 corporate HR executives who are members. An experienced mediator, facilitator of group decisions and developer of effective team process interventions, she works with top-tier HR professionals, consultants and members of the media for whom her work within the area of management and organizations has clear practical implications. She says this leadership experience has enabled her to become more “practitioner- and executive-facing,” as she embarks on more consulting and policy work.

Bendersky received her Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and her B.A. with honors from Oberlin College.

Education

Working as a consultant at Accenture in his home country of Argentina, Andres Terech (Ph. D. ’04) became a victim of the Mexican government’s decision to devalue the peso against the U.S. dollar in 1994. The “tequila effect” that this action had on the South American economy was the prime reason Terech left consulting and took advantage of a full EMBA scholarship at IAE Business School, Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, before receiving a second scholarship to earn a Ph.D. at UCLA Anderson in 2004.

He began his academic career as an IAE faculty member in 1997, teaching MBA students and executive programs. After he received his Ph.D., Terech traded southern hemisphere summers for winters, traveling north to the U.S. to teach elective courses and conduct research as a visiting professor at UCLA Anderson.  He later became a full-time adjunct associate professor of marketing in 2009.

It’s not surprising that Terech’s strongest area of research is in retailing and includes modeling consumer choice behavior and competitive market structure.

“I grew up in the retail environment, as my family had two stores in a town north of Buenos Aires,” he says. His consulting experience covers several marketing challenges, such as new product launches, marketing plans and growth strategies, promotion and communication programs, distribution strategy, pricing and sales promotions, and feasibility analysis. He has advised startups and Fortune 500 clients in a variety of industries, including retailing, agribusiness, financial services, textile and automobile, and sits on the advisory boards of several start-up companies.

Terech’s current work focuses on studying the integration of different methods of shopping available to consumers and retailers performance metrics. He takes a special interest in marketing issues related to branding, pricing, franchising and retailing — evident in the Latin American Franchising Research Council (CLIF) he founded in 2007 in Argentina, which brought together academics and franchisors to help promote intellectual leadership in franchising. He teaches courses in pricing, marketing strategy, marketing analysis and frameworks, retail management, and sales force and distribution channel strategy. He has also taught executive seminars at different business schools in Spain, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.

He enjoys writing cases for publications, describing it as “the ideal way to connect theory and practice, to provide real context to frameworks and theories.” Much of his work has been published in scholarly journals and specialized business publications, such as Case Research Journal, Marketing Letters and Harvard Business Review. When not focusing on his research, Terech can be found occasionally on a basketball court, coaching soccer and baseball, or taking the family on yearly camping trips.

Reza Ahmadi is a professor of decisions, operations and technology management. His research focuses on a range of topics, including product design and development and supply chain management. His research on pricing and contracting issues in the presence of gray markets was one of the earliest in this area of operations management.

“My research explores the effect of contract design on gray markets and how services can be used as a strategy to address the challenges in these markets. I seek to find solutions to the practical problems faced by industry,” he says.

Ahmadi is widely regarded for his research examining the practice of discounting prices in a B2B setting and is credited for developing a price-bargaining model that enhances pricing decisions in this arena.

In 2015, he received a faculty grant to support his research on fixed price and bargaining. Ahmadi will examine why different price mechanisms are used in B2B settings. His findings will provide insights into when to allow for fewer price negotiations during the product lifecycle, and how this decision affects seller and supply chain profits.

Ahmadi has published more than 35 academic papers in top journals, including Operations Research, Management Science and Productions and Operations Management. He serves on the editorial board of Production, Operations and Management Society as well as the special editorial board of Interfaces.

Over the last 27 years at Anderson, Ahmadi estimates he has taught over 4,000 graduate students. Through the years, he has taught core, elective and Ph.D. courses to students across all MBA programs, including the Global Executive MBA for Asia Pacific and the recently established Fully-Employed MBA Flex option.

As a faculty advisor for the Easton Technology Management Center, he helps create programming that exposes students to the rapidly transforming technology landscape across different verticals. Ahmadi has worked with business schools around the world to organize short educational programs focused on technology management, the information economy, entrepreneurship and globalization. He has taught students from management programs at Korea University Business School, Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, and Italy’s SDA Bocconi School of Management.

At UCLA, Ahmadi serves on the Council on Planning and Budget, where he assists in the development of strategic recommendations for the allocation of academic resources through the university’s budgetary and planning processes.

Mastery in industrial engineering landed Ahmadi consulting opportunities with various corporations such as IBM, AMD, GM, Rocketdyne, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios and Disneyland. At Rocketdyne, he was tasked with redesigning their space shuttle’s main engine to commercialize the turbo pump of their rockets so they could be produced two times faster and two times cheaper.

Theme park goers have Ahmadi to thank for helping to develop the Fast Pass concept, which manages the constant flow of customers through theme park attractions.

Outside of the classroom, Ahmadi enjoys playing guitar and has a love for sushi, running and classic rock music. He can often be found outdoors maintaining a lush garden filled with fruit trees, vegetables and roses.

Stephen Spiller’s research focuses on the psychological processes governing how consumers plan, allocate and represent their time and money. He is particularly interested in two areas: how consumers think about and make decisions about their money; and how consumers think about products as a matter of quality or taste.

“I try to integrate what we know about consumer psychology with traditional economic models to push the boundaries of each,” he says. His research approach entails diagnosing marketing problems by thinking through how consumers make decisions to understand better how potential solutions will apply to particular situations.

He serves on the editorial review board for the Journal of Consumer Research and has led data analysis workshops for professional organizations such as the Society of Consumer Psychology and the Association for Consumer Research.

Spiller earned his Ph.D. at Duke University, where he taught undergraduates in the Markets and Management Studies program. His dissertation examined the effects of perceived resource constraints and memory accessibility on the degree to which consumers consider their opportunity costs. In ongoing research, Spiller examines how consumers assess the value of money, the psychological antecedents of financial fragility, and the effects of consumer beliefs about quality and taste. At UCLA Anderson, he teaches the Consumer Behavior course in the MBA, FEMBA and Ph.D. programs.

As a result of his time in the Mid-Atlantic, Spiller is a fan of ACC basketball, North Carolina barbeque (only as a consumer, not as a producer) and bluegrass music festivals.

Brett Hollenbeck researches the changing role of firm strategy in an era of growing consumer information. His work is characterized by cutting-edge use of modeling and statistical tools for studying and simulating industry dynamics. His main innovation is incorporating uncertainty and information into these types of models.

He has used these tools to study firm economies of scale, the effects of online reputation platforms on the hotel industry, optimal antitrust policies and the relationship between industry concentration and innovation. In particular, as online ratings and review platforms have grown in use and importance, Hollenbeck has shown these have dramatically reduced the value to firms of brand names and have significantly altered firm advertising strategy.

Before pursuing his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Texas at Austin, Hollenbeck worked as an economist in the Office of Tax Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and as a research fellow at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He teaches Customer Assessment and Analytics at Anderson, equipping his MBA students with quantitative tools to measure customer preferences and use models to analyze data.

Originally from Missouri, Hollenbeck is a film buff (foreign and Western), an avid traveler and a big supporter of Texas Longhorns football.

Professor of Decisions, Operations and Technology Management Felipe Caro leads UCLA Anderson’s new M.S. in business analytics. He holds editorial positions at Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management, and he has won multiple awards and contributed significantly to the international academic literature on supply chain management. His Management Science article Product and Price Competition with Satiation Effects was awarded first prize in the 2010 INFORMS Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition.

Caro’s main interests are related to decisions made under uncertainty with a strong emphasis on practical applications. The mathematical model he developed to support the decisions fast-fashion retailers face each period resulted in increased season sales of 3-4 percent for the Spanish apparel giant Zara. “My motivation was to build an inventory allocation model that was well-grounded in the real problems faced by a large-scale apparel retailer,” says Caro. His collaboration with Zara and the effectiveness of his analytical models in the fast-fashion industry made him a Franz Edelman Laureate in 2009.

Professor Caro’s case Zara: Staying Fast and Fresh is widely taught in business schools in the U.S. and abroad. Caro adds, “I had been collaborating with Zara for six years so I had a very deep understanding of the company from the inside.” This case won the ecch (now The Case Centre) New Case Writer award and the Production & Operations Management award. Caro was the first recipient in the awards’ 22-year history to win both categories simultaneously.

“I find that the best way to improve a case is to teach it in the classroom,” says Caro, who was also awarded the George Robbins Assistant Professor Award that distinguishes excellence in teaching at UCLA Anderson.  

Prior to receiving his Ph.D. in operations management from MIT, Caro worked as an instructor in the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Chile and did research on natural resources, mostly in the forestry and copper industries. His paper Optimizing Long-Term Production Plans in Underground and Open Pit Copper Mines, published as the lead article in Operations Research, won the 2014 ENRE Best Publication Award in Natural Resources. Caro’s current research projects concern carbon allocation in supply chains, coordination of pricing and inventory decisions, unauthorized subcontracting in supply chains, and exploration versus exploitation problems. His latest research investigates the state of scope 3 carbon emissions reporting in supply chains.

Courses

Operations and Technology Management (Mgmt 410)
Global Supply Chain Management (Mgmt 240F)
Dynamic Programming (Ph.D.)