Gray Researches Interim CEOs During Sabbatical

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (January 14, 2005)—Barbara Gray, professor of management at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business and director of the Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation, has launched a research project on the role of interim CEOs in inducing strategic change as part of a recent sabbatical appointment at Tilburg University’s TIAS Business School in the Netherlands.

As the Boer & Croon Visiting Chair, Gray began the project during the fall semester, and she will return to the Netherlands in the spring to continue her research.

Boer & Croon is a Dutch firm providing interim-CEO services to companies in need of leadership for corporate turnarounds or strategic change. In addition to her research, Gray also provided negotiation and collaboration training for interim CEOs; delivered a workshop for Nextrategy, an IT consulting arm of Boer & Croon; chaired an e-conference on the science/policy interface for the EU; and led seminars at TIAS, Wageningen University, and London School of Economics.

Gray is also in the midst of a two-year appointment as the AIM Visiting Fellow at Scotland’s University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She will continue to visit Strathclyde periodically to work with faculty and Ph.D. students and provide presentations on her research on multiparty collaboration throughout the United Kingdom.

Last year, Gray spent time at Ecuador’s University of Cuenca delivering seminars and workshops for organizations engaged in developing and facilitating multiparty collaborations among the university, government agencies, businesses, and indigenous people concerned about natural resource management issues. The talks were based on Gray’s recent co-authored book, ”Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts: Concepts and Cases,” which is also being used by researchers studying environmental issues at Peru’s Macchu Pichu.