[2 September 2009]
International Management expert helms SMU Business School

Singapore, 2 September 2009 – International strategic management expert Professor Howard Thomas (??????) has been appointed the new Dean of the Singapore Management University Lee Kong Chian School of Business (??????). He will take office on 1 January 2010, taking over from Interim Dean, Professor Lim Kian Guan.

Professor Thomas brings impeccable research and scholarly credentials to SMU. He will be a strong academic and intellectual leader who will take the business school to the next level.

Professor Thomas is currently Dean of the Warwick Business School and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Warwick. In addition, he is Chair of The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International, Chair of the Global Foundation for Management Education (GFME) and Chair of the Association of Business Schools (ABS). He has also served as President of the Strategic Management Society and is currently its Dean of Fellows.

Professor Thomas is a leading scholar in strategic management. He has published a wide range of articles in areas which include competitive strategy, risk analysis, strategic change, international management and decision theory. He has also served on the editorial board of leading academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal and Academy of Management Review. Professor Thomas is the author or co-author of over thirty books including Strategy: Analysis and Practice and Handbook of Strategy and Management. Bridging theory and practice, he has been a consultant to global companies such as Unilever, Philips, Johnson and Johnson, as well as professional organizations, such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Institute of Marketing. Since 1997, he has been a Board Member of State Farm Bank, a subsidiary of State Farm Insurance, USA.

Before his current appointment at the Warwick Business School, he was Dean of the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for nine years. He was elected as a Distinguished Senior Scholar in 1986 and the James F. Towey Distinguished Professor of Strategic Management in 1987. He was previously Foundation Professor of Management at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Australia's national business school in Sydney, New South Wales, and Director of the Doctoral Programme at London Business School. He has also held visiting and permanent appointments at a range of institutions including the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management in Brussels, the University of British Columbia, the Sloan School of Management, MIT, and the Kellogg School, Northwestern University. (Please see Annex for his CV).

“The new Dean, Professor Thomas has distinguished himself throughout his career, whether as a scholar or as a Dean. I am confident that he will be an outstanding and experienced leader who can help us continue to build a business school of the highest quality. I would also like to recognise and thank Interim Dean, Professor Lim Kian Guan for his extraordinary leadership and achievements in the past year,” says SMU President, Professor Howard Hunter (?????).

“I've led an American business school and a European business school, and now I have a chance to lead a young and dynamic business school in Asia . I am looking forward to it and I am confident we will continue to groom and nurture future business leaders and creative entrepreneurs with a solid foundation in business principles while embodying strong values of ethics and social responsibility,” says Professor Thomas.

Professor Lim Kian Guan (???), the current Interim Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, will take a five-month sabbatical from January 2010, before resuming his duties at the Business School.