New Director of Integrated Management at McGill will ‘break down barriers’

After a comprehensive international search, the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University announced that Professor Steve Maguire has been appointed Director of the Marcel Desautels Institute for Integrated Management (IIM) for a five year term.

Inaugurated in 2008 with a generous donation from Marcel Desautels, the IIM's mandate is to support and promote integrated management research, teaching and practice. Through interdisciplinary management research and curriculum development, the IIM aims to break traditional barriers between disciplines-encouraging professors, students and industry leaders take a more holistic approach to management. Through cross-pollination of disciplines the IIM hopes to foster innovation and more informed, responsible decision-making in today's complex global environment. The Institute has already helped shape new curriculums in our MBA and Executive MBA programs along with other curriculum partnerships across the University.

As the Institute's leader, Professor Maguire will play a key role in building on this initial success to ensure the development of integrated management initiatives across the Faculty, McGill University and abroad. Building on our programmatic strengths, he will help foster collaborative research projects around integrated management as well as build bridges for our programs and research to other parts of McGill and the greater business community. He will also lead development activities targeted at designing innovative approaches to integrated management. 

He says, "Today's business challenges cannot be adequately tackled with knowledge from just one discipline or part of the university. We need to work together. Breaking down the business silos that divide us will allow us to collaborate across disciplines and deliver management education that fosters both technological and social innovation.

The faculty has already made excellent progress in encouraging students to focus cross-functionally on the whole of the business enterprise and to be sensitive to the social and ecological contexts of business. I want to build on the schools commitment to developing management education that is relevant to contemporary societal challenges and that promotes responsible decision-making."

As an Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization, Professor Maguire has a proven track record of taking a truly integrated approach to teaching and research. He is part of a team of professors teaching in the core of the MBA program. He also teaches courses at the BCom and MBA levels on topics related to his research (Strategies for Sustainable Development, Managing Organizational Politics); and conducts related seminars in executive education programs. In 2000, he co-developed (with Professor Mary Dean Lee) and implemented the "Pedagogy Excellence Project" - an innovative change initiative in which MBA students acted as consultants to the Faculty and for which he was awarded a "Royal Bank Faculty Associate in Teaching Fellowship". In 2008, he was a Finalist for the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching; and in 2009 he was awarded a Quebec Teaching Chair from the Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sports. Professor Maguire's interdisciplinary research addresses global health and environmental issues that are transforming business by challenging conventional ways of conceptualizing - and hence managing - the relationships connecting organizations to the societies and ecosystems in which they are embedded. He has theorized how societal issues can be addressed through the implementation of new collaborative relations between firms and NGOs, by drawing lessons from struggles over the availability and accessibility of HIV/AIDS treatments; as well as how environmental problems can be solved through interactions of states, firms and NGOs to build new global institutions, by drawing lessons from the emergence of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Professor Maguire's research has garnered a series of awards, beginning with the prestigious Academy of Management's "Organizations and the Natural Environment" Best Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2001 and, more recently, the 2010 Greif Research Impact Award for the most cited entrepreneurship paper published six years prior. He was also awarded the 2008 Best Paper Award by the Journal of Management Studies and an International Visiting Fellowship by the UK Advanced Institute of Management in 2006. In 2007, his expertise on the precautionary principle led Professor Maguire to be appointed to the Government of Canada's Chemicals Management Plan "Challenge Advisory Panel", which advises Health Canada and Environment Canada. Professor Maguire's acclaimed work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Management Inquiry, Health Care Management Review, Global Governance, Greener Management International, Strategic Organization, and Emergence, as well as numerous book chapters. Most recently, he co-edited the Sage Handbook of Complexity and Management (2011).

Contact:

Ron Duerksen

Director, Marketing & Communications

Desautels Faculty of Management

McGill University

514-398-6228

ron.duerksen [at] mcgill.ca