About me

I live in Durango, Colorado, with my wife Shere, and when she has time from her consulting job, our daughter Mallory.  We enjoy lots of mountain activities.

Years ago my wife and I worked for the Colorado Outward Bound School at Marble and in the San Juans out of Silverton.  I also worked for Dick Pownall at Vail Mountaineering, so spent 3 or 4 months a year in the mountains.  I also rowed rafts commercially in Utah.  Now age has slowed us down a bit, but we still XC ski, hike, climb the odd peak and raft, all at a pretty tame level these days.

I am on the board of Vallecito Nordic Ski Club, and Four Corners Slow Money.  I also groom nordic trails once a week for Vallecito Nordic, so get my machinery fix and make sure we have great classic tracks for skiing.  Here is our groomer and the finished ski tracks!

In terms of education, I started out at the University of California dropped out for a while. I moved to Durango, Colorado, to work, then went back to school at Fort Lewis College, finally graduating with a mathematics degree. From there I went to Yale University for my Master’s degree and earned my Ph.D. in finance from the University of Oregon.  My research interests are mostly in the area of corporate governance and corporate sustainability, especially how companies are addressing climate change and carbon management.  With Ken Bettenhausen, a just-retired faculty member at CU Denver, I developed a MOOC titled Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent on the Coursera platform.  You can access it it here: LINK to Sustainable Business MOOC.

About 15 years ago I taught the first sustainable business class at CU Denver’s Business School.  That provided the foundation for the Managing for Sustainability (M4S) MBA specialization.  I firmly believe that future managers must know about the broad range of concepts, tools and issues that sustainability encompasses.  I am happy to see a shift moving in this direction from acknowledging stakeholder capitalism to serious concern by corporations about climate change and water.  There is still a long way to go, but some companies are quickly evolving and find ways to reduce their impact, and be fairer and more inclusive organizations.  Others will surely follow or risk be seen as out-of-touch.

Personally, I have terrible carbon karma and a big carbon debt to repay. I cut pulp wood for two years and had an affiliation with a French university so traveled a lot.  The perks from United Airlines were wonderful, but now I have carbon guilt to deal with.  I think rich and middle-income Baby Boomers need to be carbon frugal so younger people and people in less developed countries have a carbon budget that lets them live life, explore, enjoy their families, etc.  I hope this class helps offset some of my carbon debt by helping you make your organization have less impact and make the world better.

Here is the picture I sent to the CU Business School Webmaster.  I thought it captured me pretty well, though I am not so well-dressed very often/ever. They chose not to use it.  They only wanted headshots.

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