The Ketchen way: Motivating and mentoring others

Dave Ketchen is at the top of his game, having recently been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management (AOM), the pre-eminent professional association for management and organization scholars, which selects only 1% of its members for this honor. Other honorees for 2023 include professors at Harvard, Illinois, Northwestern, Stanford and Wharton.

The highly influential Harbert College of Business researcher has made major contributions to the fields of strategic management, entrepreneurship and supply chain management during his 30-year academic career — 18 of those years at Auburn University.

As evidence of his influence, Ketchen has published more than 200 research articles, and his work has been referenced by his peers more than 50,000 times, according to Google Scholar.  

The AD Scientific Index ranked him as the third-most influential researcher in the strategic management field in the United States and ninth in the world among strategic management researchers. And his research has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and other major media outlets.

“When you have success, it’s a function not only of your own efforts, but what other people have done for you,” said Ketchen, a Harbert eminent scholar. “None of us becomes successful without people acting on our behalf and guiding us along the way.”  

Among the people who have guided him, Ketchen cites individuals from his undergraduate days at Penn State in the late 1980s.

Graduate student instructor Bill Brashers, Ketchen said, shared his undergraduate honors thesis with faculty member Mark Sharfman, who was impressed with Ketchen’s thinking and writing skills. Sharfman then encouraged Ketchen to consider going to graduate school.

Ketchen did. He stayed at Penn State after earning his bachelor’s degree in marketing, receiving his doctorate in management in 1994.

“I started the doctoral program at age 21 and I was as green as grass. I had some really patient professors who nurtured me along the way,” he said, recalling how a professor named Denny Gioia convinced him to study strategic management rather than organizational behavior for his doctoral thesis.

A good call, as strategic management — the study of why some firms outperform others — has been a central topic in business schools ever since.

Having benefitted from mentors in his own career, Ketchen is dedicated to mentoring his younger colleagues.

“One especially noteworthy aspect of Dave’s impact is his mentoring of the next generation of scholars,” said Auburn faculty colleague Brian Connelly, the Luck eminent scholar in management. “Most of the research studies he has performed include either junior faculty or a doctoral student, or both.”

“It is remarkable to see how these people learned the craft of scholarship by working with him and later went on to be thought leaders in the academy. If ever there was an example of the old adage about teaching a person to fish, Dave would be it.”

Katie Wowak, the Robert and Sara Lumpkins associate professor of business analytics at the University of Notre Dame, is a beneficiary of Ketchen’s mentoring.

“Dave and my Ph.D. advisor are friends,” said Wowak, who met Ketchen while she was a graduate student at Penn State. “Being at a totally different school and really having no obligation to help me out, Dave still took me under his wing.”

To date, Wowak and Ketchen have co-authored seven research papers. One project, in particular, stands out to Wowak — a study on the role that female board members play in recalling a company’s unsafe medical devices.

She, Ketchen, and their research collaborators found that companies with at least one female board member recall dangerous products 35% faster than companies with no women on their board of directors. The study attracted national media attention and won prestigious awards.

“These high severity recalls can harm or kill consumers, so this work had a true managerial and consumer implication,” Wowak said. “Dave played a huge role in getting this research published.”

According to Wowak, Ketchen motivates those he works with to up their game.

“Dave definitely makes you want to be a better scholar,” she said. “He works so hard and has a high bar for himself and everyone around him. You just want to rise up to that bar to be a better person, researcher and scholar.”

Ketchen’s high standards and motivational work ethic extend beyond academia.

Birmingham entrepreneur and artist Larry Thornton, who has guest lectured in Ketchen’s franchising class at Auburn, attests to that. The two recently collaborated on a book project where they transformed Thornton’s autobiography into a graphic novel.

At the time, Ketchen had produced three business books in a graphic novel format and found they were an engaging way to convey important concepts and lessons to a younger audience. He convinced Thornton to adopt the format for his own story.

“I get bored easily, so I need things like this to keep me interested and working hard,” said Ketchen. “I’d wake up in the morning thinking about what I’d accomplish on the book for that day.”

You Have to Live, Why Not Win? chronicles the inspirational journey of Thornton from being one of the Black students that integrated the Montgomery, Alabama, schools in 1967, to working his way up the corporate ladder at Coca-Cola, to becoming the first Black owner of McDonald’s franchises in Birmingham, to serving on the board of directors of corporations, to founding his own charitable foundation.

According to Thornton, the Birmingham city schools are incorporating the graphic novel into the curriculum for all seventh graders this fall. All proceeds of from book sales go to Thornton’s Why Not Win Institute, a non-profit that inspires people to succeed in life through working hard work, building positive relationships and accountability.

Ketchen serves on the board of the Institute.

“We are so fortunate to have him and his business prowess as part of what we’re trying to get done,” said Thornton, who admires Ketchen’s work ethic and high standards. “Working with Dave motivates me to be all that I can be. We both believe that when you create a better you, then everybody gets a better you.”

It’s fairly common in academia for a professor of Ketchen’s caliber to be at the top of other schools’ short lists when it comes to faculty recruiting.

“He gets so much interest from other schools, but he just doesn’t even take those calls,” said Wowak. “Dave is fiercely loyal to Auburn.”

“He cares deeply about Auburn and the Harbert College of Business,” added Connelly.

The opening lines of the Auburn Creed, written in 1943 by History Professor George Petrie, are:

I believe that this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work.

“The Auburn Creed’s notion of hard work resonates with me,” said Ketchen.

“It’s important to me to work for an organization whose culture and values I believe in,” he explained. “I heard it said not too long ago that if you love Auburn, Auburn will love you back. I guess I always have loved Auburn since I walked on campus.”