Transforming Business Operations for Sustainability

Meet the Expert

• 

  Michael Lenox

  Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer, UVA Darden School of Business

  Michael Lenox is a strategist and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for his work on business strategy, technology strategy, corporate sustainability, and industry self-regulation. He is a contributor to Forbes magazine and awa…

  learn more
  

  Michael Lenox

  Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business Administration Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer, UVA Darden School of Business

  Michael Lenox is a strategist and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for his work on business strategy, technology strategy, corporate sustainability, and industry self-regulation. He is a contributor to Forbes magazine and award-winning author of “Can Business Save the Earth” and “The Decarbonization Imperative.”

  Professor Lenox, the Tayloe Murphy Professorship in Business Administration, teaches the core MBA strategy course as well as an MBA elective on Strategy in the Digital Age. Since 2016, he has served as the Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer for the school. From 2008 to 2016, he served as Associate Dean of Innovation Programs and Academic Director of Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He helped found and served as the inaugural president of the multiple-university Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability. Prior to joining Darden in 2008, Professor Lenox was a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he served as the area coordinator for Fuqua’s Strategy Area and the faculty director and founder of Duke’s Corporate Sustainability Initiative. He received his PhD in Technology Management and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 and the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. Professor Lenox has served as an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and as a visiting professor at Stanford University, Harvard University, Oxford University and IMD.

  Professor Lenox’s research has appeared in over thirty refereed academic publications and has been cited in a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Economist. In 2009, he was recognized as a Faculty Pioneer by the Aspen Institute and as the top strategy professor under 40 by the Strategic Management Society. In 2011, he was named one of the top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets & Quants. Professor Lenox’s primary expertise is in the domain of technology strategy and policy. He is broadly interested in the role of innovation and entrepreneurship for economic growth and firm competitive success. In particular, he explores the business strategy and public policy drivers of the direction of innovative activity. Professor Lenox also has a long-standing interest in the interface between business strategy and public policy as it relates to the natural environment. Recent work includes the books “Can Business Save the Earth” (2018) and “The Decarbonization Imperative” (2021), both from Stanford University Press.