BRADLEY R. STAATS, DBA, is a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. He works with individuals and organizations seeking to learn and improve in order to stay relevant, innovate, and succeed on an ongoing basis. His teaching focuses on how to design organizations that are able to continuously learn as well as how to incorporate analytics so that data can drive decision making. In addition to teaching at UNC Kenan-Flagler, he works with companies around the world on their learning and analytics strategies.

Staats’s research investigates the role of human behavior in learning and operational improvement. He integrates work in operations management and behavioral science to understand how and under what conditions individuals, teams, and organizations perform at their best. He conducts field research in settings such as health care and software services, consulting, call centers, and retail. He uses archival data and field experiments to provide an interdisciplinary perspective to improve both theory and practice.

Staats publishes frequently in and serves on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals. His work has also been featured in a variety of media outlets. He has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Accomplishments Award from the Production and Operations Management Society, the Poets & Quants award as one of the “Best 40 Under 40” business school professors in the world, and the Warren Bennis Prize for best article in Harvard Business Review on leadership.

Staats earned both his DBA (in technology and operations management) and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He received his BS degree, with honors, in electrical engineering and his BA degree, with high honors, in Plan II and Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was named the Most Outstanding Male Graduate of his graduating class.

Prior to his academic career, Staats worked as a venture capitalist at a leading firm in the southeastern United States. He also worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and strategic planning at Dell.

Staats lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and three sons. He can frequently be found on local playing fields helping coach his kids’ baseball teams.