Awakening Critical Thinkers to Transform Business with Humanity and Imagination
I am Associate Teaching Professor of International Business & Strategy at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston. My teaching and research critically engage prevailing ideas to create the space to imagine and map out collaboration that promotes human well-being, justice, and the health of the Earth.
I bring the same commitments and perspectives to my public and civic engagements and Metalawyer, my advisory services practice.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” -Aristotle
Domains of Action
I focus my energy across four interrelated domains of action:
Teaching & Pedagogy
I translate theory into frameworks for action that acknowledge and embrace the indispensability of personal values, purpose, and a sense of responsibility in business and beyond. Subjects I teach include: International Business, Strategy, Business Ethics, Public Policy, Business Law, Creating Shared Value as a Way of Life, and Dealmaking for Social Impact.
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Ideas & Research
I study intellectual history to unravel and lay bare the limited ideas and ideologies that obscure and undermine the potential for people and institutions to act compassionately and responsibly. I turn these critiques into frameworks of practical reason crafted to support people committed to responsible, globally-minded strategy, and I experiment with the design of institutions of norms and laws to undergird and uplift these ambitions.
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Public &
Civic Engagement
I feel compelled to volunteer to support my communities and governments, joining my first non-profit board of directors in 2005. I have continued to volunteer for the boards of my children’s schools and non-profits supporting education. I was appointed to the Board of License Commissioners in Amherst in 2019 and in 2024 to the Board of the Amherst Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which I now chair.
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Advising & Activating Clients
I employ my experience as a deal lawyer and litigator and my expertise in strategy, contract law, and business ethics to provide advisory services under the banner of Metalawyer. This includes leading strategy retreats and providing advice as an external general counsel, as I do from time to time with the Local Enterprise Assistance Fund.
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How I Got Here:
My Path to the Present
Early Roots: Evolutionary Biology
As a child growing up, I talked with both of my parents about their intellectual passions. My father was an engineer fascinated by the natural sciences, my mother a humanist and political scientist with an eye for power dynamics and injustice. As a high schooler, I read my father’s copies of Desmond Morris’s books–The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo–and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and I talked with my mother about her Ph.D. classes and her dissertation about the United States’s policies towards Cuba and empire in the 19th century. In my senior year I took a political philosophy class that lit me up with ideas and an intellectual project. My term paper looked to the concept of memes in Dawkins to propose a theory of cultural and political evolution.
Learn more about the concept of memes as coined by Dawkins here.
Consciousness and Revolution in Marx's Theory of History
Arriving at Harvard in 1992, my project was to integrate philosophy and evolutionary biology, so I studied the subjects in parallel. That spring I took classes with leading scholars in evolutionary biology--Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin-- and moral philosophy--T.M. Scanlon and Derek Parfit.
I chose philosophy as my concentration, and in my honors thesis I tackled Karl Marx’s theory of social evolution. I wanted to figure out how Marx’s economic determinism–his conclusion that capitalist relations of production were bound to unravel and segue into socialism (as feudal relations had given way to the bourgeoisie)--connected to Marx’s revolutionary practice. How does the analysis of social dynamics take into account, and also motivate, choice and responsibility?
Ultimately, I questioned Marx’s view that social liberation is delivered by material progress made possible by capitalist relations, siding with thinkers like Gandhi and Plato who ground the potential for social transformation within the health of the soul rather than the material fruits of production.
“To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.” Gandhi
See my thesis on Marx' theory of history here (with my advisor and reader comments).
Law School, Aristotle, and Epieikeia
After working in finance and high school teaching (with a wonderful stint as a stacks assistant at the Harvard University Archives), I decided to go to law school as a more practical way to deepen my understanding of the social and political world than a Ph.D. in political science. Studying law at Boston University as a Dean's Scholar, I pursued a master’s in philosophy concurrently, and in my last semester, I took a seminar on Aristotle’s ethical theory that reignited my intellectual project with the concept of epieikeia. Finishing his discussion of Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics on justice, the professor, Stanley Rosen, showed me why Aristotle held that the phronimos–the practically-wise person–does not settle for a sense of justice defined by legal entitlements and obligations but rather embraces epieikeia, translated as equity, fairness, and decency.
According to Aristotle, “what is decent is just, and better than a certain way of being just—not better than what is unconditionally just but better than the error resulting from the omission of any condition in the rule of law. And this is the nature of what is decent—rectification of law insofar as the universality of law makes it deficient." Justice, I saw, is situational and sensitive to the entirety of the human circumstances even as shaped by laws, since the laws on the books are bound to get individual cases wrong. Consequently, “the decent person is . . . not an exact stickler for justice in the bad way, but takes less than they might even though they have the law on their side.”
Watch my remarks on epieikeia and its influence on my research in business here.
From Attorney to Ph.D.
I kept thinking about epieikeia and social change as I practiced law as a judicial law clerk, litigator, and corporate attorney, frequently (but not always) seeing clients being “exact sticklers for justice in the bad way.” I reconceived my intellectual project in terms of epieikeia–how do we promote virtue in the choices business people make, given the laws on the books and their potential for change?
I left Wall Street in 2009 to study in the Wharton School’s recently created Ph.D. program in Ethics and Legal Studies. My seminars in management led me to Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics, which I studied in my dissertation, and Kenneth Andrews’s conception of strategy, which has animated most of scholarship as well as my teaching in business ethics and strategy.
Watch my remarks on building a bespoke strategy framework for the 21st century here.