Miguel Unzueta says being named one of the "The World's Best 40 B-School Profs Under the Age of 40" by the MBA-blog Poets & Quants is "humbling and exciting. It's cool to be recognized when there's so many other people out there" -- though he can't help but humbly add that "to put it in perspective, it was just
one blogger making the list.
Maybe so, but modesty aside, P&C took the time to peruse the nominations and comments, coming up with this from Veronia Vasquez ('11):
"Professor Unzueta’s mastery of the underlying principles of organizational behavior is plain to see. He turns something that seems completely unrelated to business, i.e., psychology, and provides direct applications to managerial concepts. More than any other MBA course, Professor Unzueta’s class really taught me something about myself and the type leader I’d like to become."
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One of the first things you'll notice after sitting down in Unzueta's office is that while he's got the requisite textbooks linings his shelves, the volumes that appear most prominent are a set of books about sports covering a range of topics from Coach John Wooden to The Wages of Wins by David Berri, Martin Schmidt and Stacey Brook (a sort of Freakonomics for sports). Unzueta, you see, is a big-time sports fan, a devotee of the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Longhonrs and his hometown UTEP Miners (with a growing affection for your UCLA Bruins) who'd rather talk NFL football than discuss his own accolades.
When he's not doing his own sports analysis and research, Unzueta studies race relations and attitudes. He's published numerous articles on affirmitive action and diversity-related issues, including a recent paper that found that the more the non-beneficiaries of affirmitive action associate affirmitive action with quotas (though quotas are actually illegal), the better they feel about their own accomplishments. In his Organizational Behavior course, Unzueta presents his students with the human ramifications of management decisions, analyzing current events such as the recent recession through a psychological prism. His goal as an instructor is not to provide a "magic formula" to students who often "want purely numerical answers to concrete problems." Rather, he tries to impart a framework for critical thinking.
"The first thing you want to figure out is what questions you want to ask," Unzueta says. "To get high quality answers you need high high quality questions. The hope is that students will be open to the idea of critical thinking, because that's something they can use throughout their careers."
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