Academic Director

Ronald A. Howard is the academic director of the Strategic Decision and Risk Management certificate program. He is a Professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Professor Howard directs teaching and research in the Decision Analysis Program and is the director of the Decisions and Ethics Center. He defined the profession of decision analysis in 1964, and his experience includes dozens of decision analysis projects across all fields. Professor Howard has been a consultant to many companies and was a founding director and chairman of SDG. In 1986, he received the Operations Research Society of America's Frank P. Ramsey Medal for "Distinguished Contributions in Decision Analysis." He received from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) the first award for the Teaching of Operations Research/Management Science Practice. He is a Fellow of INFORMS and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Program Director

Carl S. Spetzler, CEO, SDG. Specializing in strategy development, business innovation, and strategic change management, Dr. Spetzler has developed creative business strategies for major financial institutions, capital-intensive companies, high-technology manufacturers, and systems businesses. Over the past 20 years, he has been a leader in designing an innovative strategy development process that helps corporate leaders cope with the lack of explicit strategic alternatives, deal with the complexities of uncertainty and risk over long time horizons, and achieve lasting change. Dr. Spetzler works with top management and boards of directors to improve the quality of decisions. He has led numerous senior executive seminars on strategic decision and risk management topics. He serves on the boards of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Decision Education Foundation. In 2004, Dr. Spetzler received the Ramsey Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS for lifetime contributions to the field. In 2006, he was inducted into the SRI Alumni Hall of Fame for his contributions to the world of financial services.

Cynthia Benjamin is Senior Engagement Manager, SDG, and Director of SDG's Palo Alto office. Ms. Benjamin has a concentration in business growth and innovation strategy, with significant consulting experience in business model development and corporate strategy in the life sciences industry. Before joining SDG, Ms. Benjamin was a design engineer on a diverse set of innovative products for IDEO Product Development, as well as founder and general manager of Samson-McCann, Inc., a consumer products firm.

William Burnett is Consulting Assistant Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University. Mr. Burnett has been teaching industrial design, innovation, and product development for over 20 years. He has a diverse and creative product background that spans from Hasbro toys to Apple laptops, including six award-winning PowerBook laptop computers. Mr. Burnett has served on the boards of directors of Advanced Digital Optics and ITG and is a board member and fellow with D2M Inc., a firm that specializes in organizational development and optimization of the R&D and engineering functions. Mr. Burnett holds eight utility patents, several design patents, and one ID Magazine award for the first true "slate" computer, the Convergent Technologies WorkSlate.

David Fishman is Managing Director, SDG. Mr. Fishman leads the Private Equity and Financial Services practice of SDG and is co-leader of the Power and Gas Utilities practice. He has conducted hundreds of consulting engagements with senior executives at both Fortune 500 and emerging growth companies. He has expertise in strategic management, business development, finance, operations, and organizational change across a range of industries. His involvement has led to successful strategies and investments as measured by the value created in the marketplace. Mr. Fishman is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities, including Stanford.

Pamela Hinds is an assistant professor in the Management Science and Engineering Department of the Stanford University School of Engineering, and is a member of the School's Center for Work, Technology and Organization. She studies the interplay between information technologies, information sharing, and human judgment. Currently, she is conducting research on the effect of geographic distribution on work, teams, cognitive and motivational inhibitors to using and sharing expertise, and workers' social and cognitive responses to autonomous agents. She has also studied the effect of intellectual property agreements on sharing, and the limitations of expertise.

She is the co-editor (with Sara Kiesler) of Distributed Work (MIT Press, 2002), which takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of distributed work groups and organizations, the challenges inherent in distributed work, and ways to make distributed work more effective. Contributors to the book include psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and computer scientists.

Pamela has a PhD in organization and management science from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from the University of San Francisco, and a BA from Claremont McKenna College.

Bruce Judd is Lecturer, Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and Executive Director, Client Education, SDG. Professor Judd has more than 30 years of experience as a consultant and educator in strategic decision-making. He founded and directs SDG's Client Education program, which helps clients develop internal capabilities to enhance the quality of their decision-making. Typical consulting assignments include transforming the decision-making culture in a Fortune 50 company, developing strategies to revitalize companies, evaluating capital investment decisions in the energy industry, and prioritizing scientific research.

Sang-Won Kim is Senior Engagement Manager, SDG. Dr. Kim is experienced in strategy development, enterprise risk management, portfolio evaluation system implementation, and decision analysis applications in the oil and gas, electric utility, transportation, and medical products industries. His experience includes leadership of an enterprise risk management effort for a leading US electric utility to identify the drivers of its short-term earnings and to quantify their impacts. Another example of Dr. Kim's experience is his work with a Southeast Asian business unit of a large US oil company to create an asset development strategy with a dual focus on natural gas assets and Pacific Basin LNG market dynamics. Before joining SDG, Dr. Kim taught decision analysis at Stanford University.

Academic Director

Raymond Levitt is academic director and founder of the Stanford Advanced Project Management program. He is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director of the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, and Courtesy Professor of Medical Informatics at Stanford University. He also co-founded and directed Stanford's Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. Before coming to Stanford in 1980, he served on the MIT civil engineering faculty. Currently, he teaches classes in strategic planning and organization design for project/matrix organizations to Stanford engineering undergraduate and graduate students as well as project and corporate executives.

Since 1975, he has served as a consultant to Fortune 1000 and other global companies in the design of project/matrix organization structures, work processes, and IT applications to support project work. His present research focuses on modeling and simulating the significant institutional costs that can arise in global projects due to substantial differences in goals, values, and cultural norms among project stakeholders. His Virtual Design Team (VDT) research group has developed ground-breaking organization theory, methodology, and computer simulation tools to design organizations that can optimally execute complex, fast-track projects and programs. He founded Vité Corporation in 1996 to commercialize the VDT research results. VDT methods and tools are currently being used to model and simulate work processes in fields such as health care delivery and offshore platform maintenance. He also co-founded Design Power, Inc., in 1989 to develop applications to automate many kinds of semi-custom engineering work.

He earned his PhD and MSCE in construction engineering and management from Stanford University and his BSCE, cum laude, from Witwatersrand University in South Africa.

James Matheson is Consulting Professor, Stanford University, and Chairman, SmartOrg. Dr. Matheson is a recognized leader in the development and application of decision analysis. Since establishing the first decision analysis practice in the mid-1960s, he has made significant contributions in the application of decision analysis to corporate and R&D strategy, marketing, acquisition, and capital investment. Dr. Matheson directed the SDG R&D practice and is coauthor of The Smart Organization, published by Harvard Business School Press. He received the Operations Research Society of America's Frank P. Ramsey Medal for "Distinguished Contributions in Decision Analysis."

Barbara Mellers is Milton W. Terrill Professor of Business Administration, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Dr. Mellers is also on the Advisory Council of the Decision Education Foundation. Trained as a psychologist, she studies behavioral decision-making and develops models that describe how people actually make judgments and decisions. She has written over 75 scientific papers on topics ranging from perceptions of fairness and emotions that follow from choice to preference reversals and contextual effects. She is on the editorial boards of numerous journals, and she has been receiving funding from the National Science Foundation for over 25 years. In 1985, Dr. Mellers received a Presidential Young Investigator Award, and in 1996 she was elected president of the Judgment and Decision Making Society. Her most recent interests focus on individual differences in decisions to cooperate.

Jennifer Meyer is Senior Engagement Manager, SDG. Dr. Meyer has worked in strategy development, economic evaluation, and business portfolio modeling for clients in the transportation, oil and gas, and technology industries, as well as telecommunications, automotive, power, and manufacturing. In a recent project for a national Canadian transportation company, she led the development and evaluation of major capital alternatives and facilitated improved organizational alignment around a new strategic direction. Dr. Meyer is active in SDG's Client Education program, training clients in strategic decision-making and risk management. She received a PhD and an MS in operations research from Stanford University and a BA in mathematics and physics from Drake University.

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell is the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in Stanford University's School of Engineering. She has also been chair of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford since the department's creation in January 2000. Previously, she was a faculty member in the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Department at Stanford, and an assistant professor of civil engineering at M.I.T. She has also served as a consultant to numerous industries and government organizations.

Her primary areas of teaching and research include engineering risk analysis and risk management, decision analysis, and engineering economics. Recent research has focused on using risk analysis, probability, and decision theory to integrate organizational factors into assessments of the reliability of a final product or service, and to allow efficient and cost-effective risk management in industry as well as in government regulation. Recent applications include the NASA space shuttle, unmanned space programs, offshore oil and gas platforms, marine pipelines, and anesthesia during surgery. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and its Council, of the Air Force Advisory Board, and of the California Council on Science and Technology. In addition, she is past president and a fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis and was a member of NASA's advisory council from 1996-98.

She holds a Ph.D. in engineering economics systems and an M.S. in operations research from Stanford University, as well as an M.S. in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of Grenoble, France.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University where he has taught since 1979. He is the author or co-author of twelve books including The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action, Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People, and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, co-authored with Robert Sutton, as well as more than 120 articles and book chapters. In the summer of 2007, Harvard Business School Press published his most recent book, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management, a collection of 27 essays about management topics. Dr. Pfeffer received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. from Stanford. He began his career at the business school at the University of Illinois and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and he has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, Singapore Management University, London Business School, and IESE in Barcelona.

Pfeffer currently serves on the board of directors of for-profit companies Audible Magic and SonoSite as well as nonprofits Quantum Leap Healthcare and The San Francisco Playhouse. In the past he has been on the boards of Resumix, Unicru, and Workstream. He has presented seminars in 33 countries throughout the world as well as doing consulting and providing executive education for numerous companies, associations, and universities in the United States.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School, where he is Co-Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, an active researcher and cofounder in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a cofounder and active member of the new "d.school," a multi-disciplinary program that teaches and spreads "design thinking." Sutton is also an IDEO Fellow.

Sutton received his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from The University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty since 1983. He has also taught at the Haas Business School and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the 1986-87, 1994-95, and 2002-03 academic years. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly publications, and as an editor for the Administrative Science Quarterly and Research in Organizational Behavior. Sutton's honors include the award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, induction into the Academy of Management Journals Hall of Fame, the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching, the McGraw-Hill Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy Award, the McCullough Faculty Scholar Chair from Stanford, and selection by Business 2.0 as a leading "management guru" in 2002.

Sutton studies the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, and organizational performance. He as published over 90 articles and chapters in scholarly and applied publications. He has also published seven books and edited volumes. In particular, Sutton (and Jeffrey Pfeffer) wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Firms Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), which was selected as Best Management Book of 2000 by Management General. His most recent book is Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (The Free Press, 2002), which was selected by the Harvard Business Review as one of the best ten business books of the year and as a breakthrough business idea. Sutton (and Jeffrey Pfeffer) has just completed Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, which will be published by Harvard Business School Press in 2006. Major themes from these books are summarized in the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Industrial Management, California Management Review, Strategy & Leadership, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, HR.com, and tompeters.com.

Steven Tani is SDG Fellow and Partner, SDG. Dr. Tani has assisted a wide variety of clients in R&D portfolio management, new business entry strategy, overseas capital investment decisions, and new product planning. His clients have included companies in the pharmaceutical, heavy industrial equipment, electric power generation, timber, petrochemicals, and office equipment industries. In 2004, Dr. Tani was named the first SDG Fellow, a new distinction for those whose extraordinary contributions to analytical disciplines allow the firm to maintain its competitive advantage in those domains. He has led many seminars and workshops in decision analysis.

Yong Tao is CEO, SDR. Dr. Tao has built SDR into a premier management consulting firm in China, assisting the largest Chinese corporations in major decisions on strategy, organization, marketing, operations, and risk management. Dr. Tao's specialty is creatively applying decision analysis to the unprecedented decisions in large Chinese corporations. In 15 years of global consulting, Dr. Tao worked with more than 20 Fortune 500 companies. He is a frequent speaker at management conferences in China and globally and taught EMBA programs in China on the Art of Advanced Decision-Making. Dr. Tao holds a PhD in decision analysis from Stanford University.

Hannah Winter is Partner, SDG and Associate Program Director, SDRM. Ms. Winter is responsible for the training and professional development of SDG's consulting staff. Before assuming this role, Ms. Winter was a consulting partner and developed business and marketing strategy in the automotive, consumer electronics, energy, and telecommunications industries. She led a management team for a global automobile manufacturer in developing a strategy for the Asia-Pacific region and in creating a winning marketing strategy for the Japanese vehicle market. Ms. Winter received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an MS and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

David Wolter is Partner, SDG. Mr. Wolter has expertise in strategy development, decision analysis, and client capability development in the application of the SDG methodology, particularly through strategy projects in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agricultural biotechnology, chemicals, and oil and gas exploration industry. He has led strategy development sessions, commercial and technical assessments, and deterministic and probabilistic analyses of alternative strategies, while training clients to build analytical models to support business decisions. Mr. Wolter earned an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, an MS in accounting from DePaul University, and a BA in economics from Amherst College. He is a Certified Public Accountant.