Donald C. Hambrick

I am just delighted this week to be chatting to Don Hambrick, a longtime colleague of mine when he was at Columbia Business School, a collaborator, friend, mentor, senior leader in our profession, former president of the Academy of Management and many, many, many other accolades.

And for our enlightenment, he's also penned an autobiography called The Improbable Professor, which we'll be talking about among many other things.

So, Don, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Rita.

And so you were kind enough to let me sit in.

on I think two sessions of your course and I really learned a lot of the craft from you about just what does it take to be engaging in a classroom and it's not sitting there flipping slides and it's certainly not lecturing but you know it's how do you get students involved how do you get them to care about what you're saying and still get through the material and make sure that they learn things that are potentially useful to them so I've been eternally grateful for that It was really a wonderful learning experience.

So the book, what prompted you to write this book? And it's called The Improbable Professor, and it's really about your journey, which suffered a lot of sideways progressions and interruptions.

So take us through what caused you to write it and maybe give us an overview.