Faculty Profile

Jill Shepherd

Adjunct Professor
B.Sc. (Hons.) (Imperial College Science and Tech, UK), M.B.A. (Warwick, UK), Ph.D. (Strathclyde, UK) Technology and Operations Management

Surrey Phone: 778-782-7446
Segal Phone: 778-782-9023
Surrey Office: SUR 5042
Segal Office: Segal 3900

Email Address:

Biography

For Dr. Jill Shepherd, becoming a professor was the key to a lifestyle change that still involves the intellectual challenge and contact with managers (through teaching, consulting and research) that she enjoyed during her career in industry and business.

Originally a laboratory geneticist, Jill went on to clinical research in the pharmaceuticals industry, then into marketing and strategy. She was also part of a start-up team which established an Information and Communication Technology-based company and, as well, worked in management consulting before earning her PhD in business at the University of Strathclyde, UK in 2002.

A British national, she joined the Beedie School of Business at SFU in the technology and operations management area in 2003 from the University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business where she was a lecturer in strategy and technology. Jill's research uses evolutionary theory to understand how knowledge generation and survival in firms is affected by organizational culture and how dynamics can be changed to ensure they are aligned to the organizational environment. She is currently Book Review Editor of the journal Organization Studies.

Specialization and Research Interests

Jill teaches strategic management on the Management of Technology MBA. Her approach to teaching involves embracing the complexity of strategy. Becoming a strategic manager involves understanding how and why strategy means something different at different times in an organization's history, at different levels within the company and between different stakeholders and managers tasked with strategizing. It involves dealing with the consequences of data meaning different things to different people and being a factor, rather than the factor in making strategy. Emphasis is placed on the role of reflective practice in learning to think strategically, and the fruitful sharing and generation of experience in the class room, as much if not more, than the use of analytical case studies. Jill's research uses evolutionary theory. Interests include using the meme as a knowledge-based, micro unit of analysis to understand the co-evolutionary dynamics of knowledge creation within firms. What does this mean? It means understanding how knowledge generation and survival in firms is affected by organizational culture and how dynamics can be changed to ensure they are aligned, and stay aligned, to the environment the organization is working within. Knowledge diversity in the organization must mirror knowledge diversity in the environment. Reflective practice is part of this work. For evolutionary reasons, attentive and focused reflection is neither spontaneous nor effortless, nor is it obvious how the myriad micro events of the everyday can, and should, be reflected upon. Understanding how managers become better at managing through reflective practice is an active research project.