Ming-Jer Chen

Education: B.S., National Chung-Hsing University, Taipei; M.Ed., National Taiwan Normal University; MBA, Ph.D., University of Maryland

Ming-Jer Chen, Leslie E. Grayson Professor at the Darden School, is a leading authority in strategic management. He is recognized for his pioneering work in competitive dynamics and ambicultural strategy and management.

Ming-Jer former President and Fellow of the Academy of Management, a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, and former chair of the Academy's Business Policy and Strategy Division. He is the recipient of the Academy of Management's Career Award for Distinguished Educator and the Academy of Management Review Best Paper Award. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading scholarly journals and is the author of Inside Chinese Business: A Guide for Managers Worldwide (Harvard Business School Press, 2001/03), Competitive Dynamics: A Research Odyssey (Peking University Press and Bestwise Press, 2009), and Selected Works of Ming-Jer Chen, a three-volume series (in Chinese) (China Machinery Press, 2020).

Ming-Jer's corporate outreach experience includes teaching at Darden, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Columbia Business School. Corporate clients include Acer, AIG, Alcoa, BOC Gases, CFA Institute, Dover, DuPont, FedEx, Merck, Morgan Stanley, Munich Re, Rolls-Royce, Taiwan Mobile, Tencent, Tshinghua Holdings, United Technologies, and China's State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC). He has been interviewed and featured in global media including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Handelsblatt (Germany), Fortune (China), PBS, and China Central TV Corp., and he writes a regular column for Harvard Business Review (Chinese). He has contributed to the East-West business dialogue via keynote speeches at such symposia as the World Economic Forum's China Business Summit, the US-China Executive Summit, and HSM forums in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Milan.

With the idea of "passing the baton," Ming-Jer has founded several initiatives to mentor academic and business professionals around the world, including the Chinese Management Scholars Community and the annual Competitive Dynamics International Conference.

Prior to Darden, Ming-Jer founded and directed Wharton's Global Chinese Business Initiative and served on the faculty at Columbia Business School. In addition, he has held honorary, advisory or visiting appointments at universities in Asia, Europe, and North America. Twice he has taught management professors from all the MBA programs in the People's Republic of China, at the invitation of China's National MBA Education Advisory Committee.

Born and raised in a rural town in Taiwan, Ming-Jer had the opportunity, before leaving for graduate education in the U.S., to study Chinese classics and philosophy with a master who was a nephew of China's last emperor. He now lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he enjoys being part of Thomas Jefferson's "academical village." On both the professional and personal fronts his focus is on making the world smaller.