He is the Director of the Michigan Human Resource Executive Programs in Hong Kong, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and India as well as the Michigan Global Program in Management Development in India. He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Business Administration at Instituto De Altos Estudios Empresariales (Argentina) and teaches at the Melbourne Business School (Australia).
His current research focuses on (1) conceptual and process linkages between human resource practices and business strategy, (2) high value added HR practices, and (3) implementing business strategy through people. He has published on these topics in the Human Resource Management Journal, Human Resource Planning, Harvard Business Review and Personnel Administrator and has contributed numerous book chapters. In 1995 and 2000, he received the best HR paper of the year from the Society of Human Resource Management. He recently completed the HR Value Proposition (2005) with Dave Ulrich.
Professor Brockbank has consulted in these areas with corporations on every continent. Among his clients have been General Electric, ICICI Bank, Tata Group, Cathay Pacific Airways, Unilever, Motorola, Harley-Davidson, Citibank, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Ericsson, Cisco, General Motors, Saudi Aramco, Texas Instruments, Exxon-Mobil, Goldman Sachs, Ford, and Hewlett-Packard. He has also participated in workshops for the Academy of Management, Linkage, The Conference Board, SHRM, Singapore Civil Service, Strategy Planning Forum, IQPC, Human Resource Planning Society, and others. His consulting focuses on assisting companies in developing and implementing successful human resource, organizational and business strategies. He is a consulting partner in the RBL Inc. He just completed his service on the Board of Directors of the Society of Human Resource Management.
Professor Brockbank completed his Ph.D. at UCLA where he specialized in business policy and strategy, organization theory, and international business. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Organizational Behavior from Brigham Young University.
Professor Narayanan received his Ph.D. in Finance from Northwestern University. His Bachelor's and Master's degrees are in electrical engineering, and for several years he was employed as a senior design engineer. He has been at the University of Michigan since 1986 and teaches corporate finance courses in the MBA and the Executive MBA programs. He has been presented the student award for teaching excellence three times.
His primary research interests are related to corporate finance and include capital structure, merger & divestitures, managerial incentives and executive compensation, and corporate governance. Some of his recent publications include “Disentangling Value: Financing Needs, Firm Scope and Divestitures,” in the Journal of Financial Intermediation, “Career Concerns and Resources Allocation in Conglomerates” in the Review of Financial Studies and "Liquidity, Investment Ability, and Mutual Fund Structure" in the Journal of Financial Economics.
Professor Narayanan teaches extensively in executive education programs. He is the Faculty Director of the Finance for Non-Financial Managers program. He is also a core faculty member in several executive education programs, including the Executive Program, Global Program for Management Development, and Management Development Program. In addition, he has taught in programs for companies such as Citibank, Daewoo, Texaco, and Holnam Cement. He is actively involved in the school's international executive education programs in Asia. He has served as the Faculty Director of programs conducted by the William Davidson Institute for senior managers from emerging economies. Professor Narayanan has extensive consulting experience with leading companies in the U.S. and abroad.
Dr. Krishnan’s research interest includes corporate IT strategy, business value of IT investments, return on investments in software development process improvements, software engineering economics, metrics and measures for quality, productivity and customer satisfaction for products in software and information technology industries. In January 2000, American Society for Quality (ASQ) selected him as one of the 21 voices of quality for the twenty first century.
His research articles have appeared in several journals including Management Science, Sloan Management Review, Information Technology and People, Harvard Business Review, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Decision Support Systems, Information Week, Optimize and Communications of the ACM. His article “The role of team factors in software cost and quality” was awarded the 1999 ANBAR Electronic Citation of Excellence. He serves on the editorial board of reputed academic journals including Management Science and Information Systems Research. Dr. Krishnan has consulted with Ford, NCR, IBM, Bellsouth,TVS group and Ramco Systems.
He is a globally recognized thought leader, idea practitioner, and an eclectic scholar with wide-ranging interests in innovation, strategy, marketing, branding, IT, operations and the human side of the organization.
He is a prolific author and has contributed numerous articles including the Harvard Business Review article “Co-opting Customer Competence”, the Strategy & Business article “The Co-creation Connection”, and the 2004 MIT-Price WaterhouseCoopers award-winner “The New Frontier of Experience Innovation”, published in the Sloan Management Review.
He is co-author with C.K. Prahalad of the acclaimed book “The Future of Competition: Co-creating Unique Value with Customers” (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), chosen by Business Week as one of the Top 10 business books of 2004, and Strategy & Business as one of the best strategy books of 2004.
Venkat’s eclectic interests span customer experiences, innovation, marketing, operations, information technology, human resources, and strategy. His current research focuses on exploring the “next practices” in value creation through experience co-creation, innovating experience environments around customer-company interactions, customer communities and nodal company networks, leveraging technology to enable human experiences, helping businesses create new sources of competitive advantage by building co-creation capabilities and processes, building the information and communications infrastructure to support experience environments and rapid knowledge creation, and developing strategy maps and balanced scorecards for organizations to compete through experience co-creation.
His current global work with companies focuses on migrating them to the next practice of experience co-creation, how to innovate experience environments, how to leverage technology as experience enablers and communities of individuals and networks of firms for co-creating value, how to build the capabilities and processes for customer-company interactions and experience co-creation, how to build bridges between marketing, HR, IT, and operations around customer experiences, how to build the brand through personalized experiences, how to manage the quality of experiences, and how to build and lead the experience-centric organization for creation of new strategic capital and sustainable growth.