Faculty

Balaji Koka is an associate professor in the area of strategic management. He joined the Jones School in 2008 from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He teaches in the Executive MBA and Full-time MBA programs and received the Teaching Excellence Award from the EMBA program in 2014. Professor Koka received his BE from Madurai Kamaraj University in India, his MBA from Indian Institute of Management in India and his PhD in strategic management from the University of Pittsburgh.

Professor Brent Smith, Ph.D. is currently Senior Associate Dean of the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. Prior to his current academic appointments, he was a member of the faculty at London Business School and Cornell University where he taught in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He has also taught for shorter periods at the University of California at Berkeley, Oxford University, the Danish Technical University and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad and has conducted executive programs around the world for companies such as Shell, IBM, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Barclays, KPMG, ExxonMobil, BP, ADCO, Lufthansa, DeBeers, Schneider Electric, Microsoft, El Paso Energy, Veritas, Dynegy, ONGC, CGG Inc., Marathon Oil, Citibank, RedBull, Phillip Morris International, NationalOilwellVarco, Swedbank, Ulster Bank, RBS, and TOTAL. His teaching interests focus primarily on leadership and management development. Dr. Smith’s executive programs include Leading and Managing Change, Talent Development and Coaching, and Leading and Managing High Performance Teams. Dr. Smith has served as leadership faculty in the corporate universities of TOTAL, Lufthansa, Tenaris, NationalOilwellVarco, and Cooper Industries. Dr. Smith has a special interest in non-profit academic and educational institutions. He co-developed the non-degree programming for Rice’s award-winning Educational Entrepreneurship Program dedicated to training primary and secondary school administrators to be more holistic leaders. Additionally, he has worked extensively with the Houston Independent School District and advised HISD’s Board of Trustees. In 2006, Dr. Smith developed a program to train senior staff and faculty leaders at Rice University. In its 10th year, Dr. Smith has trained over 200 current and future leaders at Rice. Currently, Dr. Smith has turned his interest to academic medical institutions and the unique challenges in health care. His clients include M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Methodist Hospital, Memorial Hermann Hospital, and Texas Children’s Hospital. Dr. Smith has twice received the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (1998, 2004) and the Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior Award (2004) for his research on personality, organizational culture, and employee attitudes. His research has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Human Performance, Journal of Business Ethics, and Leadership Quarterly. He is a co-editor of the book Personality and Organizations and The People make the Place. Dr. Smith’s early research focused on identifying methods of redressing adverse impact and differential treatment of protected classes in employee selection and promotion. More recently, his research interests focus broadly on personality issues in work organizations including response dynamics in personality measurement; the personality correlates of effective work performance and the relationship between personality and organizational culture. He is deeply interested in the integration of trait and social-cognitive models of personality. Dr. Smith is a founding partner of PeopleSmith, a firm specializing the enhancing organizational effectiveness through research-grounded interventions.

Marcus W. Dickson is Professor of Organizational Psychology, holding appointments at Wayne State University in Detroit, Rice University (adjunct), and Baruch College -CUNY (adjunct). Dr. Dickson’s research interests focus on leadership, especially in a cross-cultural context, and he served as Co-Principal Investigator on Project GLOBE, the largest cross-cultural study of leadership conducted to date. His work has appeared in major research outlets, including Journal of Applied Psychology, The Leadership Quarterly, Advances in Global Leadership, Sex Roles, and Applied Psychology: An International Review, among others, and has been cited over 12,000 times. A noted teacher, he has been recognized numerous times for teaching excellence, including both university and national professional society awards. He has taught at the undergraduate, master’s, executive master’s, and doctoral levels in the US, as well as internationally. An active organizational consultant, Dr. Dickson has generally focused on issues of leadership development, culture assessment, and bias and adverse impact reduction. Dr. Dickson and his wife, Heather, have one son, Michael.

Megan Gossett has been at Rice for twelve years. She joined the Jones Graduate School of Business as healthcare program manager in December 2016. In this role, she is responsible for the various healthcare offerings at Rice Business, spanning the degree programs, executive education as well as the broader healthcare community within and around Houston.

Prior to joining Rice, Megan was a professional ballet dancer. She holds a BA in psychology and a master’s in social work from the University of Houston. Megan enjoys being outdoors and spending time with her two sons.

Michael Koenig joined the business school as associate dean for innovation initiatives and executive director of executive education. His innovation position is a new role at Rice Business and will bring technology and transformative business education together, both internally and externally. His role in executive education will drive program and business model innovation with a focus on continuing to build a technology-enhanced portfolio of net revenue generating programs with local, national and global impact and stature.

He was formerly senior assistant dean for degree programs and the first executive director of program innovation at University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

As an entrepreneur, Michael has business startup experience as employee No. 4 at Logictier Inc., a Silicon Valley-based Internet infrastructure company, leading the planning and implementation of a national staffing effort that took the company from four employees to 220 employees in 20 months. Before joining Logictier, he was senior manager for professional education at the Stanford Center for Professional Development.

Michael received a bachelor’s in political science from Miami University of Ohio and a master’s in international political affairs from the University of Kentucky. He has a passion for the beautiful game (soccer) and after a college career playing division I soccer in the Midwest for Miami University, he focused that passion on coaching youth soccer for the past 30 years. He and his wife, Jacqui, and children Connor (15) and Elsa (12) moved to Houston from Charlottesville.

Sharad Borle has been a marketing professor with Rice University since 2003. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in marketing from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from XLRI Institute of Management in India and a B.Tech in electronics engineering from Banaras Hindu University also in India. Prior to his academic career Professor Borle worked in India in the Department for International Development, Suzuki Motor Corporation and Network Limited.

Ravi has lived, studied and worked in the US and Asia, and brings an intimate experience of both the corporate and social sectors – as an organizational consultant, executive coach, entrepreneur and social activist. He is a student and practitioner in the Vajrayana tradition as well as in yoga. After moving back to Asia, he is now focused on introducing to schools and colleges innovative programs on mindfulness based emotional skills and conversational intelligence. He hopes to publish a book on this subject by the summer of 2016.  Making Bangkok his base, he intends to collaborate with a US based group to develop master trainers in Asia.