Charles Corbett

Professor of Operations Management and Sustainability

UCLA Anderson

Charles J. Corbett is IBM Chair in Management and a professor of operations management and sustainability at the UCLA Anderson School of Management; he holds a joint appointment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Throughout his career, Corbett has been drawn to newly emerging research areas in operations management. “Once a domain becomes well-established, it gets the attention of many scholars who are much smarter than I am, so it’s time to move on to unplowed territory.”

Corbett was the founding faculty director of Anderson’s Easton Technology Leadership Program (now the Easton Technology Management Center) and of the award-winning interdisciplinary UCLA Leaders in Sustainability graduate certificate program. He served as associate dean of the MBA program and, from 2009 to 2012, as faculty chairman and deputy dean for academic affairs at UCLA Anderson. “Playing a role in managing an organization as complex as a business school has certainly further enhanced my appreciation of the challenges executives face every day.”

His published work addresses the diffusion, impact and governance of ISO 9000 (quality assurance requirements) and ISO 14000 (standards for environmental management tools and systems), manufacturers’ implementation of energy efficiency practices, and, most recently, governance and diffusion of eco-labels. He is editor-in-chief of Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management and holds editorial positions at other leading journals including POM and the Journal of Industrial Ecology. In 2013 he was elected a lifetime fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society. He received the Citibank Teaching Award, the Executive MBA Class of 2006 Outstanding Teaching Award and the Robbins Assistant Professor Teaching Award, in addition to the Dean’s Prize for exceptional faculty mentorship of UCLA Anderson doctoral students, the UCLA Staff Assembly’s Faculty/Staff Partnership Award and the J. Clayburn LaForce Faculty Leadership Award. He was an AT&T Faculty Fellow in Industrial Ecology for 1997–99.

Corbett has worked with teams of MBA students to study emerging areas such as green building, carbon footprinting in global firms and eco-labeling, and with Ph.D. students on many of his research projects. In the classroom, Corbett’s objective is to get students to think about processes, no matter what they do or where they do it — though in 21st-century technology, once-familiar processes, like a physical assembly line, take the “invisible” form of information and ideas. “There’s a very strong connection in my mind between quality of management in general and good understanding of operations and processes. And the beauty of operations is that some things don’t change.”

Christopher Poliquin

Assistant Professor of Strategy

UCLA Anderson

Christopher Poliquin joined the UCLA Anderson faculty in 2018. His main research interests lie at the intersection of technology, organizational design and strategy, including the effect of tech adoption on wages and the determinants of firm hierarchy in startups.

Other work, widely picked up in the media, examines the factors that affect gun policy and its impact on violence. In one paper he looked at the effects of handgun waiting periods on gun deaths and in another the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. “Firearms are a leading cause of injury-related death,” Poliquin says. “We need more research that can speak to basic facts related to gun violence and the potential impact of different policies.”

His more recent research has explored the question of who benefits ÔÇò or benefits most ÔÇò from the adoption of technology in the workplace. Using data from Brazilian manufacturing firms, Poliquin found that when firms adopt broadband technology, higher-paid workers benefit the most and pay inequality increases.

“Scientific methods are a powerful tool for contributing to contemporary debates of interest to managers and policymakers,” Poliquin says. “How are the gains from technology distributed in society? What organizational decisions allow startups to create the most value? How we answer these questions, and choices we make as a result, have potentially large impacts on the economy and people’s lives.”

Poliquin earned his doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School. He was also a teaching fellow in the economic analysis of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.