I was born in Walnut Creek, California and I grew up mostly in California. I only spent two years in New Jersey in high school, but both in the northern and southern California. I have lived, once I went to college I've lived in, my first job was UCLA so that was California then Texas then Ohio. I went to graduate school in Connecticut. So, we've been around the United States pretty completely. What do I, things I do I enjoy doing, In the winter I ski and in the spring, summer and fall I ride bikes. So that's about it.

I teach in the College of Business. So, we have a full range of undergraduate business degrees, everything from accounting and finance, marketing and management and lots of specialties like real estate and things like that. I think coming out of the business school undergraduate programs, you usually have pretty broad options and opportunities everywhere from going to work for one of the big accounting firms or investment banking firms or consulting firms down to working for banks and/or retail. We have a lot of software people, people with some technical skills who get jobs in the tech area here in Utah. So it's pretty, pretty broad range of jobs, but I think we have a really good undergraduate placement office in the College of Business that helps make sure all that thing happens. So the graduate programs, we have again the College of Business. Most of them are Masters or specialized Masters degrees in finance, accounting, M.I.S. and a couple others. That's Management Information Systems. And those people tend to get jobs that are specialized in the functional area either in accounting or in finance, for example. And then we have the part-time MBA program, a full-time MBA program, an executive MBA program and the online MBA program, and all of those are associated with again pretty well established labor markets. So, there's lots of good opportunities associated with those programs as well.

My area of research is in strategic management and strategic management for in a non technical world sort of the way I describe it. I try to understand why some companies make more money than other companies. Most of our economic theory is derived to sort of explain why homogeneity in performance among firms and yet there is sometimes, there can be significant homogeneity in performance. I always like to use the example of Walmart and Kmart. As far as I can tell they sell about the same stuff and yet Walmart is one of the largest companies in the world and Kmart struggles of bankruptcy. And it is not what they sell. It's how they operate, what they do. And so, my research is designed to understand where that heterogeneity in performance comes from. I have been engaged in that research since I began as a professor in 1980, and it developed as a set of theoretical tools that have come to be important in the field of strategic management explaining why some firms outperform others. I don't organize my career around specific research projects like they might do in the physical sciences, but instead I organize my career around the questions that I ask. So, eighty percent of my work is on why do some firms outperform others. Then I have another more recent area of work which is in entrepreneurship which focuses on where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from and does it make a difference. And that also work, that work as well. It's beginning to have a pretty significant impact in the field of entrepreneurship. So, those are basically the two things I've studied my entire life, my entire career.