The following have been elected to the Executive Committee:
- 5 year Leadership track: Julia Storberg-Walker
- Archivist/Secretary: Ayesha Sengupta
- Representative-at-Large for Communications: Payal Kumar
- Representative-at-Large for Research: Xiaoan Li
We will feature our new officers here to help members know them better. Let's start with Julia and Payal!
Julia Storberg-Walker
5 year Leadership track
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What makes you tick as a person, generally? What 's a good day for you?
I come alive when I am in conversations with people and we all learn something new about the world and our relationship to it. I love conversations that are spacious and open; where genuine curiosity and unknowing exists. These types of conversations are not usually cultivated, especially in higher education, because in this context usually someone has a position to defend or an argument to win.
A good day for me starts with meditation or sacred reading/journaling/drawing, and then moves to walking my dog Buddy before it gets too hot outside. Then I have breakfast and work a few hours. Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon I take a break and take a NAP. Yes, a NAP. I'm trying to get all of my doc students to take naps, too. There's evidence that naps help your brain (and they are fun to take, too!). I work a few more hours then stop. In the spring and summer I love going into my garden to pick salad fixings. I try to take Sunday off every week, and aspire to be 100% technology-free on that day. I think taking a weekly technology fast gives my brain space to breathe.
2. What is the focus of your work in your organization and what do you love most about it?
I teach at the doctoral level at George Washington University. I am also a certified leadership coach and certified Healing Touch practitioner. At GW, I love seeing doctoral students experience and understand things differently, and I love it when the classroom is a container for creativity, innovation, intuition (YES!) and wisdom. I'm not sure what I'm doing with the coaching and biofield healing combination right now--ask me again in a couple years.
3. What do you look forward to as a new MSR officer? What kind of contribution would make your stint meaningful for you?
I look forward to developing relationships with MSR members; I look forward to serving the needs of emerging MSR scholars and possibly expanding MSR's scope in MBA and doctoral education globally. I would be happy to look back on my tenure as an MSR officer if I would see engaged younger scholars thriving and taking more and more leadership positions in the AOM and in their home country.
4. What's your message to the members? What's your "invitation" to them?
I believe the world needs MSR more than ever. The way I see it, all of the world's current challenges could be addressed if humanity would remember their spiritual foundation. I also think we need to consider non-human challenges in this group as well, and that understanding the deep interconnectedness of people, animals, planet, cosmos--the unity as Bohm would say--is absolutely necessary.
I invite MSR members to continue to build this community of support and resources for this important work.
Payal Kumar
Representative-at-Large for Communications
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What makes you tick as a person, generally? What 's a good day for you?
What makes me tick is an insatiable appetite for learning, and also the desire to disseminate this learning. I am usually a highly motivated individual, but as soon as I have mastered a job, I am then itching to move onto another more challenging role. I’ve worked in four industries, and I guess that now in academics, I have finally found my true calling.
A good day for me is when I can tick off everything on my to-do list! I’m pretty much a work workaholic, working on multiple research projects at a time, with one eye on the deadlines to be met.
2. What is the focus of your work in your organization and what do you love most about it?
I am Professor and Chair HR/OB and Head of Research and International Collaborations at BML Munjal University, India. This university is fairly new in the higher education scene in India, and I love to be able to co-create, whether it's arranging for an international conference, or a webinar on how to publish in Academy of Management Discoveries. Recently I was thrilled, as we managed to successfully bid for the International Critical Management Studies conference, to be held at our university on December 2021.
3. What do you look forward to as a new MSR officer? What kind of contribution would make your stint meaningful for you?
I look forward to serving MSR as the Representative-at-Large: Communications. Through means such as the newsletter, I look forward to disseminating information about MSR globally. The present executive council is full of dynamic members that truly want to make a difference. I hope to be able to communicate far and wide about the phenomenal work they are doing.
4. What's your message to the members? What's your "invitation" to them?
I believe we need to bring the ‘soul’ back into management. For too long it has been about a limited range of stakeholders, from the shareholders to the CEOs. Stakeholders need to also include the employee, and we also need to be greatly concerned about sustainability, not only profit. While spirituality and religion are present in the workplace in various forms, it tends to be the elephant in the room, with no one really wanting to talk about it. And yet this can make a real difference to us as individuals and to the workplace.
I would invite new members to dip their toes into the MSR pool, to see what it is all about. I’m sure they will be pleasantly surprised. I know I was.