Meet our Term One Lecturers: Julia Richardson

 Associate Professor Julia Richardson 

I'm please to introduce Julia Richardson, one of our perennial favourite lecturers, from York University, the Schulich School of Business, in Toronto Canada, ranked number thirteen of Elite Global  Business Schools in the QS Global 200, 2013 report. We (the Otago MBA management team) consider Julia's involvement in our programme as an example of our ability to recruit top professors from around the world (see also Denis Kobzev).

Julia is our lecturer for Organizational Leadership for the tenth year and views teaching on the Otago MBA as "always one of the highlights" of her academic year, owing to the diversity of students’ professional, academic and personal experiences. "This diversity in the classroom adds an extra ‘edge’ to learning outcomes and, equally importantly, offers a unique opportunity to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about the implications of what it means to be a leader."

Julia’s interest in global leadership careers stems from her own international work experience. She has worked in the private and public sectors in the UK, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore prior to taking her current position at York University, Toronto. Her corporate experience focused primarily on career coaching, recruitment and selection, and training and development. In her position at York University, Julia teaches undergraduate and graduate courses, with a specific focus on international human resource management and career management.

As a personal insight, Julia is a phenomenally likeable person with an upbeat approach to life.  She innately focuses on the quality of students' reasoning (i.e., what and how they think) rather than whether they adopt a "lecturer advocated" perspective.  She recognizes that "right answers" do not exist at the MBA level and readily adapts her class (and pedagogies) to enhance students' conceptual reasoning abilities: she wants students to explore what it means to be a leader in an ever changing global business environment. 

Thank you Julia!