Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics

Professor Abrahamson studies the creation, spread, use and rejection of innovative techniques for managing organizations and their employees. He is best known for his work on fads and fashions in management techniques. He is also an expert on the management of organizational change. He has explored the topic of change management in Change Without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), which won a Best Book of the Year award from Strategy and Business.

Modupe Akinola is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Faculty Director the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics. Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Professor Akinola worked in professional services at Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch. Professor Akinola examines how organizational environments- characterized by deadlines, multi-tasking, and other attributes such as having low status- can engender stress, and how this stress can have spill-over effects on performance.

Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor Emeritus of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is noted for contributions to economic theory and resource and environmental economics. He holds bachelors (first class), masters and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University, where he studied at Churchill College and taught at Christ’s College. He has also taught at Sussex, Essex, Yale, Stanford, École Polytechnique, Stockholm and Princeton. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Universite´ de Paris Dauphine.

Professor Donna M. Hitscherich currently serves as a senior lecturer of Finance, director of the Private Equity Program, and a Bernstein Faculty Leader at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. Professor Hitscherich’s courses include Corporate Finance as well as the elective courses Business Law, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Advanced Corporate Finance. In 2002, she was nominated for the Dean’s Award for Innovation in the MBA Curriculum for her presentation of the Advanced Corporate Finance course.

Professor Jick is a leading expert in Leadership and Organizational Change.  He has had a long career of both academic and consulting work in this field. In 2020, he became the Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership. He has an MS and PhD from Cornell in Organizational Behavior. He was a professor at the Harvard Business School for 10 years and a visiting professor, organizational behavior-human resource management at INSEAD and London Business School. 

Nicole Royer is the Assistant Director at the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School.

Nicholas Zambrotta is a Program Manager in the SINGO Lab in the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Nick is responsible for overseeing lab operations and projects, analyzing data and communicating findings, and collaborating with research professionals to attain ambitious goals. Nick joined the Business School in June 2023. 

He holds a MA degree in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University and a BA degree in Psychology from Rutgers University.