My Teaching Philosophy

Beliefs, Normative Commitments, Principles, and Intended Outcomes

In my classes, I challenge students to develop their own leadership philosophy: their beliefs about how to lead an organization and what creates value.

Over time I have challenged myself to develop my own teaching philosophy. This guides me in what and how I teach, which deviates significantly from how others approach teaching.

Why I Start With Judgment

The truth is that the most important decisions in business and leadership rarely arrive in clean form. They come wrapped in ambiguity. The data are partial. The trade offs are real. Smart people disagree. Time is limited. And the cost of getting it wrong can be high.

That is why my teaching philosophy starts with a simple belief: the purpose of teaching is not just to transfer knowledge. It is to develop judgment.

I care deeply about concepts. I want students to understand theories, frameworks, and evidence. But I do not think conceptual mastery is enough. The real question is whether a student can use those ideas when the answer is not obvious. Can they reason carefully under pressure? Can they distinguish signal from noise? Can they recognize the assumptions hidden inside their own argument? Can they engage competing interpretations without becoming paralyzed by them?

In other words, can they think, decide, and lead under uncertainty?

That is the standard I care about.

What Real Learning Looks Like

This philosophy shapes how I teach.

I am drawn to classrooms where students have to take a position. Not because I want quick opinions. In fact, I worry when people confuse confidence with clarity. I want students to commit to a view because doing so forces them to reveal how they are thinking. What assumptions are they making? What evidence are they privileging? What risks are they discounting? What second order effects are they ignoring?

That is why I value debate. Not debate for its own sake, and not debate as theater. I value it because disagreement is one of the best instruments for learning. When smart people look at the same situation and reach different conclusions, something important is exposed. Often it is a hidden assumption. Sometimes it is a different weighting of risks. Sometimes it is a clash of values. Sometimes it is simply that reality allows more than one plausible interpretation.

Leaders have to operate in that world all the time.

Business education should prepare them for it.

This is also why I am skeptical of classrooms that are heavy on certainty and light on struggle. Students do not build judgment by memorizing settled answers to unsettled problems. They build it by wrestling with consequential decisions, defending their logic, listening seriously, and revising their view when the argument improves.

That revision point matters.

One of the most underrated skills in leadership is the ability to change one’s mind for the right reasons. Many people can defend a position. Far fewer can improve one. In my classroom, I want students to experience both. I want them to learn that rigor is not stubbornness. Rigor means logical consistency, explicit assumptions, careful use of evidence, and a willingness to update when a better argument emerges.

High Challenge, High Respect

In fact, one of the clearest markers of my teaching philosophy is that I believe in high challenge and high respect.

Students should feel stretched. They should feel accountable. They should know that superficial answers will not survive for long. But they should also feel respected enough to take risks, test ideas, and think aloud in front of others. The goal is not comfort. The goal is growth. Yet growth happens best in environments where challenge is paired with seriousness and fairness.

This balance matters because the enemy of learning is not discomfort. It is shallowness.

The classroom failure that bothers me most is not silence. It is discussion that sounds energetic but lacks precision. It is conversation full of opinions but thin on reasoning. It is the appearance of engagement without the substance of thought.

That kind of discussion may feel lively in the moment, but it leaves little behind.

The best classes work differently. Students enter with a point of view. They encounter evidence or arguments that complicate it. They are forced to confront trade offs they had not seen. They begin to understand why reasonable people make different choices in the same situation. And by the end, even if there is no neat consensus, they leave with something more valuable than closure: clearer judgment.

That, to me, is real learning.

Teaching Starts With the Audience

Over time, I have also become more convinced of something else: good teaching must begin with the audience.

It is easy for instructors to start with what they want to teach and then deliver it in a rigid way. But I think that gets the sequence wrong. Effective teaching starts with a careful understanding of who the learners are, what experience they bring, what they are trying to learn, what problems they are likely to face, and how they will use the material.

This means the same case can and often should be taught very differently to different audiences.

I may use the same case on the same topic with MBA students and with senior executives in executive education, but I would not teach it in the same way. The audiences bring different experiences, different constraints, different practical needs, and different questions. What they find salient is different. What they need to be pushed on is different. What the teaching should emphasize is different.

The intellectual core can remain stable. The design should not.

To me, that is part of the craft of teaching. If judgment is contextual, teaching must be as well.

The Classroom Is Also Physical

I also think there is a dimension of learning that is often underappreciated because it can sound too subtle until you see it.

Engagement is not only intellectual. It is also emotional and physical.

You can often tell when a student is truly in the discussion before that student says a word. They are leaning in. They are attentive. They are looking up. They are listening actively. Their posture signals presence rather than passivity.

The opposite is also true. Disengagement often appears physically before it appears verbally.

I do not mean this in a superficial sense, and I am not talking about performance for its own sake. I mean that the quality of collective learning is shaped by how people show up in the room. Serious discussion depends not only on what students say, but also on the attentiveness, energy, and readiness they bring to the exchange.

That matters in education. It also matters in leadership.

Beyond Technical Competence

I also think teaching has a broader purpose. Business schools do not simply train analysts. They help shape leaders. And leadership is not just a matter of making correct decisions. It is about mobilizing people, allocating resources, balancing competing objectives, and acting responsibly when the consequences extend beyond the organization itself.

This means students need more than technical competence. They need habits of mind. They need the discipline to slow down when everyone else is rushing. They need the courage to take a stand when ambiguity makes easy answers impossible. They need the humility to know that strong convictions are not the same as infallibility. And they need the capacity to act even when certainty never arrives.

What I Hope Endures

Over time, I have come to believe that the most durable outcome of teaching is not what students can repeat back at the end of a course. It is what stays with them years later. A useful framework. A sharper instinct for trade offs. A habit of asking better questions. A deeper appreciation for the fact that leadership is often exercised in settings where there is no perfect answer, only better and worse reasoning.

That is what I hope students carry forward.

So my teaching philosophy, in the end, is simple to state even if it is difficult to practice:

Teach students to think clearly, decide responsibly, and lead effectively under uncertainty.

Everything else follows from that.

The frameworks matter because they help students see more clearly. The discussion matters because it sharpens reasoning. The standards matter because judgment does not develop without discipline. And the classroom matters because it is one of the few places where people can practice the habits of leadership before the full weight of consequence arrives.

We live in a world that increasingly rewards speed, confidence, and strong claims. Those things have their place. But in business, as in life, the people who matter most are often the ones who can do something harder: remain thoughtful in ambiguity, rigorous in disagreement, and decisive without pretending certainty they do not have.

That is the edge I try to teach from.

And it is the edge I want students to learn to lead on.