Bruce McKern
Professor of International Business and Director of the Business Leadership and Innovation Programs
bruce.mckern@sydney.edu.au
Phone:
Fax:
Professor Bruce McKern was until August 2007 Director of the Stanford Sloan Master’s Program in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. The Sloan Program is an intensive one-year full-time Master’s Degree in Business for experienced executives in mid-career and Professor McKern was responsible for its direction, academic quality and expansion from 2001. After stepping down as Director he became a Visiting Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University where he is undertaking research on the strategies of international firms from rapidly developing economies. McKern continues to teach a new international core course, Global Context of Management, in the MBA Program of the Graduate School of Business.
McKern joined the University of Sydney in January on a half-time basis as Professor of International Business. His primary role is in the recently created United States Studies Centre, as Director of the US Business Leadership Program, with a focus on applied research and outreach in the business-related areas of the Centre. He is also working with the Faculty of Economics and Business in the development of its new Executive MBA Program.
McKern gained a BE in Chemical Engineering with Honours from the University of Sydney and worked as an engineer and manager in Canada and Australia, before completing a PhD in International Business at Harvard University.
Prior to taking up his previous position at Stanford, Dr McKern was from 1992 to 1996 Professor of International Business and President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute, an institute devoted to research and executive education in the field of international management and based at Carnegie Mellon University. He was recruited from that post in 1996 to be President and Dean of the Monash-Mt Eliza Business School, Melbourne, and was honoured in 2001 as Emeritus Professor at Mt Eliza and as University Professor of International Business in the University of Queensland.
McKern first joined Stanford University in 1989 as Visiting Professor of International Business in the Graduate School of Business, following his role as Founding Professor of Management and first Dean of Macquarie University's Graduate School of Management in Sydney, Australia. He also served as a Board Member of the State Rail Authority of NSW during the corporatisation of Australia's largest commuter and long-distance railroad.
Professor McKern's teaching and research interests are in the field of international strategy and management. He has written extensively on the international minerals industry, is the author or co-editor of eight books including The Handbook of Australian Corporate Finance, Multinational Enterprise and Natural Resources, and Limits to Prediction, and has published numerous papers in academic and professional journals on multinational enterprise, industrial development and international business.
Other publications include Transnational Corporations in the Exploitation of Natural Resources (United Nations and Routledge, 1993), a chapter on Australian economic policy in J. Dunning (Ed.), Governments, Globalisation and International Business, (Oxford University Press, 1997). and 30 Stanford international case studies, distributed by Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School.
Professor McKern's most recent book, Managing the Global Network Corporation (Routledge 2003) focuses on the organisation and management of contemporary international firms. It includes his work on the role of the corporate headquarters in diversified multinational corporations and the sharing of responsibilities with strategic business units.
Professor McKern has been a Visiting Professor at INSEAD, IMD, other European and U.S. management schools and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is an Honorary Professor of the University of Queensland Business School and a Visiting Professor at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
He has served as a consultant to the United Nations, OECD, and many international companies and was a member of the National Gallery Society of Victoria board, the Australian Government’s National Multicultural Advisory Council and the Ministerial Inquiry into Postgraduate Education in the Australian Defence Force. He was a Member of the Masters’ External Academic Committee of the Securities Institute of Australia (now FINSIA), which developed the academic requirements for the Institute’s degree of Master of Applied Finance and Investment.
Dr. McKern was previously a Founding Member of the Global Trade Institute of Pennsylvania, a Council Member of the US-Korea Institute (Washington DC), and a Member of the Academic Council of the Prague International Business School, Czech Republic, from 1993 to1997.
He is a member of the Academy of International Business, the Strategic Management Society, and the American Economic Association, and a member of the Editorial Board of Management International Review. He is also an angel investor in several start-up firms in Silicon Valley.