John Kim
Associate Professor in the Practice of Organization & Management | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
Management consultant by training and passion. Learning with 400+ BBA, MBA, Executives every year.
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Biography
Management consultant with 20+ years of experience working with executives to make difficult decisions and implement sustainable change. Now sharing that consulting process with students and executives.
Enjoying the learning journey with 500+ business school students annually. Strategy, consulting, healthcare strategy. BBA, MBA, MSBA, Executive Education Programs.
Education (2)
Emory University, Atlanta, GA: MBA, Strategy and Management Consulting 2005
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA: BA, Economics 1993
Areas of Expertise (6)
Management Consulting
Workshop Facilitation
Organizational Design
Strategic Planing
Healthcare Consulting
Strategy
Publications (1)
Consulting Fundamentals: Skills, tools, tips
ConsultantsMind LLCJohn Kim
2023-10-28
Written by an ex-Deloitte consultant, this book gives you the top 200+ things you need to think and work like a consultant. John Kim is an associate professor at Emory’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, GA, USA. He teaches 400+ students a year on strategy, consulting, and healthcare. 1) Think of this like an executive summary. It is direct, structured, easy-to-read, and no jargon. It’s a reference book and toolkit. 2) The paperback is in color and easy-to-follow. Whether you’re a new hire, or a corporate manager, or a solo entrepreneur – this can help you get more done. 3) Some of the questions answered in the book: - Why do clients hire consultants? - What are consulting competencies? - How to prepare for a client project? - Why are external consultants (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, - Deloitte) so effective? - How do consultants “sell” their services? - How to write a proposal and statement of work (SOW)? - What are the tips for running a great client interview? - What are the pitfalls of too much benchmarking? - What does consulting PowerPoint design look like? - What does it mean to solve problems with hypotheses? - Why is messy client data a great opportunity? - How to prevent scope creep? - How to network effectively within the company? - How to say “no” to a client? - What’s the key to executive presence? 4) This content complements the 75 videos on “Management Consulting” specialization on Coursera.com. Get a free trial on Coursera to get a flavor of the teaching style. 5) Want to see a sample of this content? Go to www.ConsultantsMind.com (#1 Google Search for consulting blog).
Research Spotlight
In the News (8)
Big Wins for BBA case competition team
Emory Goizueta BBA online
2024-05-16
BBA case competition team wins a lot of case competitions. In the last year, 1st place (3 times), 2nd place (twice).
Faculty and staff honored for excellence in teaching
Emory News Center online
2022-05-12
Vulcan Materials Company Teaching Excellence Award: John Kim, senior lecturer in organization and management
Should you get your team in sync, async?
Atlassian - Work Check Podcast online
2021-10-05
In this episode, you’ll hear from John Kim, of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School about the high cost of unnecessary meetings, and GitLab’s Jessica Reeder shares the story of her mind-bending move to flexible, asynchronous work. Harvard Business Review’s Christine Liu joins to defend the magic of collaborative, working meetings, and Rebels at Work author Carmen Medina shares what gets missed when groups don’t meet in real-time.
2018 Top 50 Undergraduate Professors: John Kim, Emory University (Goizueta)
Poets & Quants online
2018-11-13
Organization and Management professor John Kim says he knew he wanted to be a business school professor once he realized his extensive experience as a management consultant was really an undercover way of teaching business. The consulting professional turned business professor now teaches strategic management, management consulting, and healthcare strategy to Goizueta Business School undergrads. He also oversees Goizueta’s Business Institute, a three-week business bootcamp for non-business majors. When he’s not teaching undergrads, Kim can be found blogging about the role of a management consultant and related topics including tips and tricks for interviewing clients and how to solve complex business problems. Kim’s blog, “Consultant’s Mind,” is consistently rated as one of the top leading management consulting blogs and websites to follow.
Strategy is more important now than ever to be ahead of tomorrow’s business shifts
Emory Executive Education online
2020-06-01
“Twenty or 30 years ago, having a strong brand or good products was enough. Not anymore, it’s hard to stay on top now,” said John Kim, a lecturer in organization and management at Goizueta Business School at Emory University. “It’s very difficult to have a sustainable competitive advantage.” We live in a copy-cat world. It’s easy to Google “best practices” online and make your business more operationally efficient. It’s never been easier to hire from the competition and outsource half of your business operations to third-party manufacturers, designers, marketers, consultants, and fulfilment companies. Benchmarking the competition is often the first step. Empirical studies indicate that few firms can perform well above average for a sustained period. However, those same studies find that a small subset of firms do consistently perform well above average for years or even decades. This profitability is attributable to finding an attractive segment of the market with high growth and few major competitors, as well as offering a unique value proposition to customers. However, it is more likely that today’s competing firms closely resemble one another, rather than offering a distinctive business model in a way that creates value, said Kim.
Strategy for a Messy Tomorrow
IEDP online
2020-01-16
Beware of False Choices “One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices,” says John Kim, Organization and Management faculty at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. “Strategy is no longer a choice of ‘this’ or ‘that’ but much more often ‘this and that’,” he says. It is looking beyond these false, over-simplified choices that set good managers apart and allow for more complexity and ambiguity. From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it's not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don't follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.” Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don't you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.”
John Kim: Teacher, Blogger, Jedi Master
The Emory Wheel online
2018-04-25
A quick Google search for “consulting blog” registers the blog of Emory Lecturer in Organization and Management John Kim (05B), “Consultant’s Mind,” as the first result. Kim created Consultant’s Mind in April 2012 to define the role of consultants and how they “think a bit differently” compared to employees in other business divisions, he said. “Increasingly, people want to know what your point of view is,” Kim said. “They really want to know that you have an opinion and [you are] able to back that up with data.” With over 400 blog posts in his repertoire, Kim provides commentary and videos on a multitude of business-focused topics, including tips and tricks for interviewing clients and solving complex business problems. He publishes five to seven times per month, and has been posting for over five years.
Goizueta Business School welcomes new faculty
emorybusiness.com online
2016-12-01
Goizueta welcomes new faculty including (from left to right) Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management; Rohan Ganduri, assistant professor of finance; Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems & operations management; Cassandra Estep, assistant professor of accounting; Karl Schuhmacher, assistant professor of accounting; Inyoung Chae, assistant professor of marketing; Demetrius Lewis, assistant professor of organization & management; Morgan Ward, assistant professor of marketing; and Tian Heong Chan, assistant professor of information systems & operations management. John Kim, not pictured, is a lecturer in organization & management. “We are thrilled about these additions to our team,” says Kristy Towry, vice dean for faculty & research, Goizueta Term Chair in Accounting, and professor of accounting. “They are all innovators in their fields, and I can’t wait to see what new knowledge they’ll bring to the table here at Goizueta.”
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