Biography

Ming-Jer Chen, Leslie E. Grayson Professor at The Darden School, is a leading authority in strategic management. He is recognized for his pioneering work in competitive dynamics and ambicultural management.

Ming-Jer is President and Fellow of the Academy of Management, a Fellow of the Strategic Management Society, andformer chair of the Academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division. He has received numerous publication awards and has served on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. He is the author of Inside Chinese Business: A Guide for Managers Worldwide (Harvard Business School Press, 2001/03) and Competitive Dynamics: A Research Odyssey (in Chinese) (Peking University Press and Bestwise Press, 2009).

Ming-Jer’s corporate outreach experience includes more than 20 yearsof executive education teaching at Darden, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Columbia Business School. His corporate clients include Merck, FedEx, United Technologies, DuPont, AIG, Munich Re, Alcoa, Taiwan Mobile, Rolls-Royce, Dover, Acer, Tencent, and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of China’s State Council.  

Interviewed and featured frequently in global media, including Forbes, TheWall Street Journal,  Handelsblatt (Germany), Fortune (China), and China Central TV Corp., Ming-Jer also writes a regular column for Harvard Business Review (Chinese). He has contributed to the East-West business dialogue via keynote speeches at such symposia as the World Economic Forum’s China Business Summit (Beijing, 2000) and the US-China Executive Summit (New York, 2004). He is conference convener for the Strategic Management Society’s Special Conference in China (2012).  

Prior to Darden, he founded and directed Wharton’s Global Chinese Business Initiative and served on the faculty at Columbia. In addition, he has held honorary, advisory,or visiting appointments at universities in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.  Twice he has taught management professors representing all of the MBA programs in the People’s Republic of China, at the invitation of China’s National MBA Education Advisory Committee. 

Born and raised in a rural town in Taiwan, Ming-Jer had the opportunity, before leaving for graduate education in the U.S., to study Chinese classics and philosophy with a master who was a cousin of China’s last emperor.  He now lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he enjoys being part of Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village.” On both the professional and personal fronts his focus is on making the world smaller.