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Lasting Lessons With Professor Nick Baloff
Back trouble can be a real pain. But for Nick Baloff, who underwent surgery at age 30 to relieve it, the experience led to a revelation.“I found myself lying in a hospital bed watching everything going on around me and realized how incredibly inefficient it all was,” recalled Baloff, who recently retired and donned the mantle of emeritus professor of business administration at the Olin School.
“I studied industrial engineering as an undergraduate and later specialized in operations. I was trained to look at how things worked. I started asking questions and soon realized that the entire health care system was in trouble.” 
So, Baloff, serving on Stanford University’s operations faculty, began to research staffing issues in hospitals—what he saw as “the equivalent of factories for health care.” He was hooked.
He went on to research and develop projects, including a regional health care center for migrant Mexican farmers in the central valley of California, and became founder and division head of a health administration program at Stanford. (The medical school dean insisted that Baloff move to the medical faculty to run the program.)
Baloff has been a consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services and has written on policy implications related to national costs of HMOs.
Health administration, however, is just one of three management research specialties that Baloff has cultivated and excelled in over the course of a 43-year career. Thirty of those years he has spent at the Olin School. Sustained proficiency in research,
“Nick Baloff was instrumental in the development of the Olin School and helped to recruit and develop a first-rate faculty in organizational behavior."
--Dean Mahendra Gupta
teaching, and consulting in three disparate fields--operations and organizational behavior being the other two--is a rarity in professorial ranks. Few have matched this record.
“Part of what explains this schizophrenia has to do with my Ford Foundation Fellowship,” Baloff said recently on the evening prior to teaching his last EMBA course of the semester. “The foundation had written a report about how institutionally based and anti-intellectual business education had become, so they developed lucrative fellowships that stressed interdisciplinary training. At Stanford I was trained in both quantitative and behavioral simultaneously. I studied operations management, but my mentor and chair of my dissertation committee was a well-known social psychologist.”
Baloff's pioneering work on learning curves in industry, the subject of his dissertation, is still widely cited 40 years later.
Over the years, Baloff, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, has served in many roles that have included dean, consultant, researcher, faculty member in both medical and business schools, executive coach, mentor, faculty coach--and raconteur. He leaves no detail unturned in colorful stories that inform and entertain, a plus in the classroom.
When he arrived at Washington University by way of Oklahoma in 1976, Baloff brought with him an impressive set of credentials. Undergraduate training as an industrial engineer at the University of California-Berkeley, a master’s degree in industrial management from MIT, and a doctorate in business from Stanford. He held teaching posts at Stanford and the University of Chicago, worked for McKinsey and Company as a full-time consultant, and had just served a three-year term as dean of the University of Oklahoma, where he pumped new ideas and enormous amounts of energy into a university hungry for change.
“We couldn’t hire fast enough,” said Baloff , who added 43 faculty in three years and developed an exchange program with a Saudi university that leveraged Oklahoma’s stand-out geology program in the midst of a national energy crisis. “I had access to Oklahoma’s congressmen, and the White House,” recalled Baloff, “which helped fund federal research on energy policy. We couldn’t identify our opportunities fast enough.”
One day, Washington University came calling for a business dean. Baloff, lured by the opportunities in a private institution, said yes.
At age 38, he burst onto the scene with ambitious plans in tow. But unexpected shifts in the University’s administration delayed plans.
A little over a year later, Baloff turned to full-time faculty pursuits, where he would help build the School in foundational ways. “I very soon discovered that the best job in the world is a tenured professor,” he said. “I knew Washington University was a good place to be, and I wanted to make my life here.”
A master builder
Baloff’s impact on the School has undeniably contributed to its rise. “Nick Baloff was instrumental in the development of the Olin School and helped to recruit and develop a first-rate faculty in organizational behavior,” said Mahendra Gupta, dean and Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professor of Accounting and Management.
Baloff also conducted research, with Olin Professor Bill Bottom, on team building that has led to curricular innovations in Olin’s MBA, PMBA, and Executive MBA programs.
“As chair of the PMBA redesign committee, Nick pushed through an important set of changes,” said Bottom, the Joyce and Howard Wood Distinguished Professor of Organizational Behavior. “These became the standard for PMBA programs, causing satisfaction and retention at Olin to rise from 55 to 60 percent to nearly 100 percent.
At Olin, Baloff began to focus more on the area of organizational behavior. He shared his thoughts with then-dean Robert Virgil. “’I want to do behavioral stuff from now on,’ I told Bob. Well, he looked at me like I’d lost my mind,” Baloff recalled.
“Our behavioral area was weak and small. But I had a very good colleague working with me, Walt Nord. Gary Miller, a political scientist [now in WU’s Department of Political Science] joined us and eventually we began to hire faculty. We were able to build the strategy and behavioral area from four total to 16. Today we have an absolutely outstanding group of faculty.”
This strength is due, in part, to Baloff’s coaching, said Bottom. “Nick passed on his innovations and his skill set by generously coaching junior faculty to teach in those subjects. The OB group has had a number of faculty who won Reid Teaching Awards or the Reid Chair. All of them would tell you that Nick’s coaching was key to their development and success.”
"From my first day at Olin, I always felt that Nick wanted me to succeed at this profession and that he would do whatever he could to make that happen," said colleague Stuart Bunderson, associate professor of organizational behavior. "We spent many hours together in his office talking about professional development and the 'tricks of the trade.' His insights and his support were invaluable to me."
Among Olin students, Baloff has been considered a tough professor and at one time was affectionately dubbed “Darth Vader.” He has been consistently voted “Teacher of the Year,” too, by students taking operations and organizational behavior classes in all three graduate programs—MBA, PMBA, and EMBA.
He developed innovative new courses—Organizational Change and Power and Politics in Organizations—which have proved popular with students and earned him praise.
“Nick was among our very favorite EMBA professors, by no mean feat, given the level of excellence of the EMBA faculty,” said Marilyn Gannon, EMBA ‘01, a consultant in entrepreneurial business development who went through the program with husband, Sean. “He is one of the smoothest and best practitioners of the case method I have ever encountered. He has a rare talent in stimulating the dialogue and probing to deliver insights. It helps, of course, that he is absolutely steeped in the background of each case and able to draw out a variety of relevant themes, no matter where the discussion goes.”
Baloff is also adept at giving students what they need.
“The Organizational Behavior and Power and Politics classes filled in knowledge gaps left behind by my undergraduate schooling and professional experience,” added Sean, principle engineer with SAIC. “The latter was clearly the best class in the program.”
Baloff will tell you that the richly textured classroom experiences that he has brought to his students are directly related to his consulting work, “absolutely the best complement to teaching.”
He snagged his first consulting job—the first-ever summer internship posted by McKinsey and Company--while working on his PhD at Stanford. “They didn’t know quite what to do with me,” he said with a chuckle. “I read a lot of training manuals and was fascinated by what I had observed over that summer.”
He discovered a passion and talent for consulting that has never let up. Over the past 45 years, he has consulted for Fortune 500 companies, the Ford Foundation, and other organizations in varied industries including consumer goods, health care, financial services, life sciences, and manufacturing.
He also has taught and consulted for the Universidad del Valle in Colombia and Catolica de Santiago in Chile. Over the past 15 years, he has been a visiting faculty member at both the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University. And schedule permitting, he has been generous with service to several corporate and non-profit boards of directors.
He has taken to task his belief that “Good ideas will get done. You just have to reveal how good they are,” and admits to narrowly escaping the life of a gadfly. “I get bored about every five years,” he claimed, “and then, something comes along to interest me. The great thing about my job has been the flexibility to pursue my passions.” Equally great, one could argue, has been the right combination of roles.
Baloff has returned to the Bay Area with his wife, Alexandra, eager to spend time with their children (both MBAs) and five grandchildren. “I can never get enough of them,” he said. He also plans to offer pro-bono consulting to non-profit organizations in the health care industry.
“I’ve been blessed with a set of wonderful opportunities and developmental experiences throughout my career,” Baloff said. “I’ve spent 30 happy years at Olin.”
by Cynthia Georges
