Slack, Dr. Dean

Dr. Dean Slack, MBA 

Dr. Dean Slack is a lifelong advocate of learning while working. He worked professionally during each of his academic experiences, having attended classes or taught during the evenings or weekends. He is a strong supporter of others who are seeking to do the same. He started by teaching evening students in person at a business school in North Carolina. He got excellent reviews for bringing the real world and applied research methods into the classroom in his marketing and finance courses. Later, he taught various leadership, strategy, and management courses in the brave new world of Online Learning (10+ years now) and earned high marks for combining scholarly findings and real-world experience into learning.  Long before COVID-19, he pioneered a graduate course in leading global virtual teams. 

His business experience started while working on his undergraduate degree, and his career has allowed him to integrate work experience from a broad base of business and organizational functions. He’s worked his way up to VP/GM of a research-based strategy consulting firm. He’s also been through more unexpected organizational upheavals and changes than anticipated. He’s deeply experienced in Leadership, Teams, Organizational Development/Change, and Human Resources, as well as Marketing, Finance, Analysis, and Strategy. 

His academic degrees started with a Bachelor of Science from Ohio State University, where he majored in Entrepreneurship: New and Small Venture Management. His MBA is from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business – where he was part of a pilot ‘exchange’ program also to take courses at the local rival UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business. His Doctorate (in Leadership and Organizations) is from George Washington University. His dissertation research was in Leaders’ Fostering of Innovation. While at GWU, he studied under top scholars in leadership, organizational learning, and action learning/research. Each of his degrees was earned evenings and weekends - while working full-time. 

In addition, Dean is a CMA and a CFM and completed the first of the CFA exams and an 8-week Investment Bankers program in financial analysis and Excel. These financial credentials round out his work experiences in various functional areas. Dean has personally hired 150+ people in his career, has been the GM of a 35-person consulting firm, and has led multi-functional areas, having as many as 50+ people and cost-cutting programs that organized 1,100 people. He's been a multi-term officer of a 900-member non-profit. He’s helped C-level executives shape and lead organizations as their director of operations/chief of staff. He knows the importance of maintaining and growing one’s own hands-on productivity and expertise. He’s worked in marketing, finance, licensing, strategy, operations and new products. Dean has also facilitated a number of train-the-trainer sessions in change management. He’s also received a “Top-10% of Professors of the Year” three times in his online teaching.

Dean is also a professional social research methodologist, having completed countless projects on the corporate/for-profit side of things and advising those doing doctoral research with everything from quantitative statistics to qualitative interviewing methods and data analysis to research design. He’s very well-experienced in a wide range of research methods.    

One of his favorite experiences is "When prior students email me and let me know I made a difference." He’s known for combining academic theory, empirical data, and real-world experiences into his teaching and helping students to gain insights as they, too, become scholarly practitioners in the “real world.”