Jackson Nickerson
Executive Vice President and Chief Social Scientist
Jackson Nickerson has a long and distinguished career teaching, researching, consulting, administering, and entrepreneuring (see Wikipedia here). Starting out as an assistant professor in 1996, he became the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis.
Recipient of 20 teaching awards from undergraduates and executives alike, he received the 2003 State of Missouri Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2019 Strategic Management Society Educational Impact Award. You can see him here offer insights on how the design of successful pedagogy and andragogy differ from undergraduates, masters students, and executives.
Jackson was a co-creator of Critical Thinking@Olin, which won the inaugural MBA Innovator’s Award from the MBA Roundtable and catapulted Olin MBA employment rankings to top five finishes for more than a decade. With AACSB — the primary business school accreditation association — he created Leading in the Academic Enterprise, a series of leadership development seminars for administrators from assistant deans to provosts.
As the Associate Dean and Director of Brookings Executive Education from 2009 to 2017, he led many innovations including one of the first Executive Master of Science in Leadership degrees in the nation, doubled executive enrollment, and increased revenue by 75%. He was the first ever senior fellow at the Grameen Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor of Corporate Governance as Insper in Sao Paulo Brazil and a frequent collaborator with Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Post Graduate School.
His research spans organization and strategy topics best described as strategic leadership. An overview of his academic articles are found here, books on strategic leadership are found on Amazon here, and leadership column he wrote for Government Executive here.
He is the founder/co-founder of five companies. Of note is NFORMD, which produced a first of its kind online sexual assault prevention program used by colleges and the U.S. Army. A consultant for scores of companies and government agencies, he advises on strategy development, inclusion and diversity, and processes to ensure that leaders solve the right problem the first time. Jackson is the chief social scientist for EPC Learning Labs LLC.
Jackson holds a Ph.D. in Business and Public Policy, an M.B.A., and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, all from University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before entering academia, he was a control systems engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
