AOM 2010 Theme Magazine - Academy of Management Online

Nancy J. Adler
It would be hard to imagine an annual meeting of the Academy
of Management without Nancy Adler, whose contributions
over the years have ranged from presenting groundbreaking
research to chairing major workshops and symposia to
exhibiting art. Occupying the S. Bronfman Chair in Management
at McGill University, Prof. Adler was the fi rst woman ever
recruited to McGill to a tenure-track management position and
the fi rst to receive tenure and be promoted to full professor.
Today, she is the fi rst senior faculty member that McGill’s new
MBA students encounter, for it is Prof. Adler who leads the
“Global Leadership: Redefi ning Success” seminar, an intensive,
three-day course that she inaugurated for all incoming MBAs.
In her words, the seminar “is designed to prepare people for
leadership at the intersection of business and society. It is
created out of concern for the future of humanity and the earth
and recognizes that how we respond today to global ecological
and economic change will reverberate across generations well
into the future.”
No one better illustrates than Prof. Adler the theme of this
year's meeting – how action can be consonant with passion
and compassion and how intellectual achievement at its best is
informed by deep personal values. A few years ago, she told a
leadership conference how her mother as a Jewish teenager in
Vienna in the late 1930s had the courage to venture to Gestapo
headquarters to ask for help for her family from the city’s
highest-ranking Gestapo offi cer, who happened to be the father
of a friend from school. The offi cer located the girl’s imprisoned
father (Prof. Adler’s grandfather), had him released from prison,
and arranged exit visas for the immediate family to escape the
country.
“Good transcends evil; even as evil eclipses good,” Prof. Adler
told her audience. “With just this fragment of my mother’s story
deeply embedded in my being, it is not in the least bit surprising
that I chose to focus my initial academic career on crosscultural
leadership – on learning how people from every culture,
religion, nationality, and race can work together to each other’s
benefi t while living in peace…Leaders know unequivocally that
evil exists. They also know that people capable of good are
disguised in every religion and every walk of life; they know that
laudable behavior is never completely inconceivable.”
24│ Academy Of Management │ Montréal 2010
Montréal Scholars
Contributing
to the Theme
© Brigitte Bruyez - www.brigittebruyez.com
Prof. Adler invites all Academy members to
her art exhibition (see p. 13) and will speak on
“Leadership Insight” (Friday, 2:00 – 4:00 PM);
“Daring to Care: Scholarship that Supports the
Courage of Our Convictions” (Sunday, 11:30 AM
– 1:30 PM); “Artistic Passion Igniting Workplace
Action” (Sunday, 2:20 – 4:20 PM); and as the MCD
Distinguished Speaker on “The Creative Economy
and Beyond” (Monday, 5:00 – 6:30 PM).