The fun part about teaching a strategic management course, says Assistant Professor of Management Scott Ganz, “is that we are trying to teach students how to build businesses that are different from their rivals in ways that contribute to firm performance.
“Therefore, we need to go beyond teaching best practices—which tend to make us the same as our rivals—and instead give students the tools to develop creative insights and then apply them in a competitive setting.”
Ganz joins the UCR School of Business faculty this fall quarter, with a deep interest in this topic and a long history of teaching students with his own twist. “What I try to do is help students see how other entrepreneurs and business leaders have tried to do this very hard thing, why some have succeeded, and others failed. I focus on the failures just as much as the successes.”
While studying the firms that failed during the financial crisis, his interest in this subject grew. “Many of these firms were perceived to be market leaders right up until they failed. It makes me a skeptic,” says Ganz. “If all we do is focus on the businesses that have succeeded, then we can’t distinguish the firms who had good strategies from the ones who were merely lucky.”
The Politics in Organizations
“But, for the most part, the research on management and strategy assumes that everyone in the firm wants the same stuff or that there is one actor or set of actors—for example, the CEO or the stockholders—whose preferences matter more than others. That seems odd to me.” It also matters a lot for management practice, he says.
“If we only teach managers in business school about how firms make decisions in settings where there’s no conflict, then they are going to be unprepared for managing real organizations. “If instead we show them how to make effective decisions in firms where there is real diversity in preferences, then they’re going to be better equipped to manage stakeholder-driven decision-making processes.”
Ganz has specific guidance for students, recent grads, and professionals: “When I talk to executives and my former students, they consistently emphasize how important it is that their managers have the tools to evaluate the competitive contexts they face and then make decisions that respond to those competitive challenges that take seriously the existing sources of advantage for the firm,” he says.
“This to me, is the essence of management education. Whether you are an undergraduate who is just starting a career, a middle manager looking to ascend within a corporate hierarchy, or an executive trying to improve a firm’s performance, the hardest part is asking, ‘How can my firm compete better?’ Those are the conversations I love to have.”
Research to Read
Of Ganz’s recent research, he suggests a couple of papers that may be useful for navigating these topics. “ Conflict, Chaos, and the Art of Institutional Design ” was published in Organization Science in 2023. “This is a really cool paper for those interested in understanding the
connection between politics and organization strategy,” says Ganz. “It shines new light on a really old puzzle in management, which is why so many of the world’s longest-lived organization are beset by political conflict.” He also published “ Subcoalition Cluster Analysis: A New Method for Modeling Conflict in Organizations ” in Management Science in 2025 with co-author Daniel S. Schiff. “A passion of mine is developing new computational tools that apply management theory in ways that are really accessible to managers,” says Ganz. “This is a really nice example.”
Coming to California
Moving from east to west, Ganz will teach business strategy at the undergraduate level at the UCR School of Business. “I’ve taught a lot of different audiences in a lot of different regions of the country,” he says.
Most recently, he was an associate teaching professor at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and a research fellow with the think tank American Enterprise Institute, both in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy, and he earned his Ph.D. in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in economics and political science at Amherst College. “It’s exciting to be in a place where so many students will use what we teach them in class as a tool for economic mobility and to contribute to the economy of the Inland Empire and beyond,” says Ganz of UCR. “I am interested getting to know the businesses that drive the local economy, and to bring them into the classroom.” A New York City native who grew up in Manhattan, Ganz is also looking forward to the SoCal lifestyle, with his wife, young girls, and golden retriever. He also “loves baseball, whether playing, coaching, or rooting for the New York Yankees,” he says. “You’ll probably see me at lots of college games.”
