Instead of watering core courses down to the lowest common denominator, we ratchet them up a bit.

On core courses
Instead of watering core courses down to the lowest common denominator, we ratchet them up a bit. We challenge students to fill in skills that they might not have. Wharton's core marketing course, for example, is much more analytically rigorous than most schools' core marketing courses. This attracts a lot of students who had considered marketing a soft science and are pleased to find out that it can be approached much more rigorously. That's how we think that managers ought to be approaching things.

On collaboration
The students in my class are very resourceful at finding clever ways to use or change models. For example, I had a student look at the effect of 9/11 on travel services. The traditional way to approach this would have been to assess sales before and after 9/11 and determine the impact based on the difference in sales, but this student used a much more sophisticated model. He realized that the travel market had been in flux and growing rapidly before 9/11, and taking that into account, he came up with a much larger negative impact on the travel industry. We worked on a paper together, and it generated quite a bit of attention at a professional conference we attended. It was a great point of pride for me that my partner was my MBA student. People were asking, 'Where do you get MBA students like that?'

On teaching MBA Exec students
I enjoy teaching in every program at Wharton, but the MBA Exec students represent the best of all worlds: they have the hustle of the undergrads, the desire for real-world applicability of the full-time MBAs, and the "push back" of the short-course executive education participants. I can say with confidence (and I even admit this to students in the other programs) that the MBA Exec teaching experience is always my favorite. I'm glad to have the privilege!

On technology in the classroom
Wharton has made quite an investment in classroom technology through the West Learning Lab. I'm currently using two multimedia programs initiated here at Wharton. FutureView gives students an opportunity to develop forecasts and marketing plans for radical new products, like auto-drive cars, for instance. It lets them project the future and use those projections to make marketing decisions. Rules of Engagement is a competitive strategy scenario that allows students to explore the characteristics of various strategies — those that work well, and those that don't. As a faculty member, it's a great luxury to have these resources. They make concepts so much clearer and more immediate. Other schools haven't been able to replicate them, and Wharton is now trying to figure out how to share the wealth.

On being a professor
I've always been a number cruncher. I was raised on sports statistics. I look at marketing as an area where the data is just as rich, but where companies aren't taking advantage of it. I'm a professor because I want to help companies utilize data. And I'm a teacher because I want to help spread the gospel. It's a great privilege to get a buy-in from the world's future business leaders. I've been extremely lucky to be in a position where teaching and research align so nicely.