Spotlight on academic directors
Plan now to attend the popular Director’s Program at the 2026 EMBAC Conference! For academic members at the director’s level and above, the Director’s Program offers you and your colleagues valuable networking time and insights and takeaways from presenters on relevant topics.
To achieve extraordinary outcomes, innovative thinking is essential at all levels of the organization. As a leader, make your mark by learning more about how you can address these critical questions:
- What innovative strategies help organizations anticipate and shape the future?
- How do we respond to emerging opportunities with flexibility and speed?
- How can we conquer the uncertainty inherent in the future?
The session will provide practical tools, grounded in the latest neuroscience research, to help leaders shape the future. In a highly interactive session, participants will identify principles to question implicit assumptions, seize opportunities, and develop the resilient capacity to work creatively with change and uncertainty.
Participants also will discuss a remarkable case of a trailblazing leader who seized an opportunity, overcame setbacks, disrupted the status quo of his industry, and achieved an extraordinary outcome. Applying principles from the story, participants will focus on three essential questions:
- What is our audacious goal?
- How do we get there?
- What is stopping us?
Participants will emerge with practical methods for questioning current assumptions, building trusted relationships, transforming adversaries into allies, increasing innovative possibilities, decreasing uncertainty, dealing with setbacks, and maintaining a strategic advantage in a constantly changing competitive business world.
About the speaker
Iris Firstenberg, PhD, adjunct professor of psychology at UCLA, and adjunct professor of management at UCLA Anderson, specializes in strategies for creative problem solving and innovative thinking. Her latest book, Extraordinary Outcomes: Shaping an Otherwise Unpredictable Future (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), provides a practical framework to help organizations navigate in a world of uncertainty.
Firstenberg also conducts seminars on creativity and innovation for a wide cross-section of Fortune 500 organizations, including companies in aerospace, software, automotive, healthcare, entertainment, defense, telecommunications, energy, financial services, retail, sports management, and pharmaceuticals, as well as government agencies such as NASA.
In recognition of her teaching, she received the 2002 UCLA Department of Psychology Faculty Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2011 UCLA Extension Distinguished Teaching Award.
You play a vital role in the higher education: Your efforts help shape the future of programs, support the mission of your schools, and inspire your staff. Take a closer look at what you can do to maximize your performance.
This session will feature fundamental elements, insights, and applications of Dr. Brent Smith’s Five Creatures Lesson (FCL). It will offer EMBAC participants opportunities to reflect upon, discuss, and reimagine how they can lead their teams towards truer market potential.
About the speaker
Brent Smith, PhD, marketing professor and former dean of the School of Communication, serves as Emerson College’s associate vice president for executive education. An accomplished teacher, scholar, consultant, and practitioner with multifaceted expertise in strategy, analytics, ethics, and global business, he has developed several courses for students in undergraduate, graduate, international, executive, and online programs.
Smith’s research appears in leading mainstream and niche academic journals, such as the Journal of Business Research, the International Journal of Consumer Studies, Psychology & Marketing, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the International Journal of Bank Marketing, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Technology in Society, and the Journal of Sport & Social Issues.
This session will focus on how to sustain ourselves and our teams through ongoing change, identifying what we need to carry forward and what we should leave behind. Final title and speaker to be announced.
Register now!
Academic members can register for the Director's Program when they register for the 2026 EMBAC Conference. Visit conference registration for links to register.
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