James Fredrickson
Professor, management department | The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business
Austin, TX, UNITED STATES
Strategic decision processes, strategy implementation, and executive leadership.
Areas of Expertise (9)
Executive Compensation
Leadership Development
High Performance At Work
Top Management Teams
Management Strategy
Executive Leadership
Strategy Implementation
Strategic Decision Processes
Strategy Formulation
Biography
James W. Fredrickson is a management professor and holds the Tom E. Nelson, Jr. Regents Professorship. He is an expert in the areas of strategy formulation, top management teams, CEO compensation, and strategy implementation. His research discoveries shed light on the challenges faced by decision makers in corporations, nonprofits, and governmental entities, helping separate management facts from popular business mythology.
He has received multiple teaching awards and was listed in Bloomberg Businessweek as among the best graduate business school teachers in the nation. In his popular Art of Leadership course, Fredrickson uses the film "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," which he produced based upon Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writings, as a tool for exploring the role language plays in leadership.
Fredrickson has extensive consulting and executive education experience, the majority of which has been on the topics of strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and executive leadership. Clients have included Accor Brasil, Advanced Micro Devices, Allstate Insurance, Applied Materials, BBVA (Spain), BMC Software, Banco do Brasil, Chase Manhattan Bank, Club Resorts, Deloitte & Touche, FedEx Kinko’s, GKN (England), Global Marine, GlobalSanteFe, GTE, Gulf States Toyota, HSBC, Halliburton, High End Systems, IBM, La Quinta, Local Insight Media, NationsBank, Rio Tinto (Australia), USX, Tandem Computers, Federal Reserve Bank, Tandy, Vitro, S.A. (Mexico), YPF (Argentina), and M.D. Anderson Cancer Medical Center.
Media
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Links (1)
Education (3)
University of Washington: Ph.D., Strategic Management 1980
Wake Forest University: M.B.A. (With Distinction), General Management 1973
Wake Forest University: B.B.A., Business Administration 1969
Media Appearances (6)
This Summer, Take a Vacation From Business Buzzwords
McCombs Today online
2014-06-25
Sometimes perfectly good words transform into jargon or business clichés through repeated abuse.
Martin Luther King's Legacy of Leadership
Texas Enterprise online
2013-01-19
McCombs Management Professor James Fredrickson uses King’s writings, particularly his 1963 essay “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in his MBA Art of Leadership class.
Should Your Next CEO Be an Ex-CMO?
Texas Enterprise | Big Ideas in Business online
2011-07-26
Fredrickson says that a CEO’s work history is more or less important depending on industry and circumstances. One key element is the level of uncertainty.
Greed at the Top: CEO Pay and the Great Recession
Texas Enterprise | Big Ideas in Business online
2010-12-10
“For most executives, other than the people who founded the companies, you cannot justify the scale of their pay based on their contributions to the company.”
Frederickson Produces Film of MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" for MBA Leadership Class
McCombs Today Online online
2010-01-14
Fredrickson has been using King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in his Art of Leadership class for many years. "It is very powerful and illustrates a lot of important leadership issues."
Fredrickson Discusses What Makes a Great Teacher
McCombs Today online
2009-10-07
So what makes someone a great teacher? We asked Professor of Management James Fredrickson to weigh in.
Articles (5)
James W. Fredrickson Citations
Google Scholar
Listing of top scholarly works by James W. Fredrickson.
The influence of a firm's approach to innovation on its ability to attract analyst coverage
Academy of Management
2012-01-01
This paper explores a tension that firms may face when attempting to develop competitive advantage based on knowledge-based resources.
Sharing the wealth: social comparisons and pay dispersion in the CEO's top team
Strategic Management Journal
2010-03-11
The antecedents and consequences of pay dispersion are studied using theory that focuses on the social comparisons that occur among members of the CEO's top team.
The effect of strategic decision process and information source on strategy content
Academy of Management
2006-12-01
This study addresses the link between strategic decision-making processes and actions that result from those processes.
Are you sure you have a strategy?
Academy of Management Executive
2005-01-01
After more than 30 years of hard thinking about strategy, consultants and scholars have provided an abundance of frameworks for analyzing strategic situations. Missing, however, has been any guidance as to what the product of these tools should be— or what actually constitutes a strategy.
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