Faculty

Markus Karner teaches interdisciplinary courses that combine complexity theory, ecology, evolution, and strategy. He uses these tools to explore the functioning and evolution of complex adaptive systems through diversity, recombination, and creativity.

Markus has been teaching undergraduates and MBA candidates at Singapore Management University since 2005. He owns a Singapore based consulting company, Karner Consult Pte Ltd.

A native of Austria, Markus holds a PhD in Life Sciences from the University of Paris and a MSc from the University of Vienna. He held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at the University of Hawai’i in Honolulu.

His research used molecular biology tools in microbial ecology in the Mediterranean, Pacific Ocean, and Antarctica. He was awarded the U.S. National Science Foundation Medal for Services in Antarctica.

Markus published his original research in the prestigious journal Nature and other peer-reviewed publications, and wrote a textbook on biological models for business. His research was funded by the National Science Foundations of Austria and the U.S.A., and by the Commission of the European Communities.

Markus is tri-lingual in English, German, and French. He lives with his family in Singapore.

Flocy joined the Singapore Management University in 2012 with the Human Capital Leadership Institute as the country lead for India, servicing the Indian MNCs. Subsequently, she became a Secretariat member of the Asian Human Capital Awards set up by the Ministry of Manpower to honor innovative human capital practices emerging from Asia. Today, Flocy’s role in SMU encompasses designing, delivering and facilitating executive development programs for industry specific programs and customized programs for the university’s tier corporate clients. She is also a certified trainer in delivering the Global Mindset Inventory and the Facet 5 personality tools.

Prior to joining SMU, Flocy worked in India. She has a blend of academic and professional experience to her credit. She commenced her career as a merchandiser for a Swiss Multinational company in India and moved on to head their International Marketing Division, working with global brands like Nike, Walmart, Itochu, Marks & Spencer, Gap, Calvin Klein etc. Flocy also worked as a consultant for a short while specializing in joint venture collaborations for Indian apparel companies.

In mid-2005 she took a career switch to academics and moved on to head the Post-Graduate Wing of the KC College of Management of Studies in South Mumbai as its Academic Head where she spearheaded student exchange programs and tie-ups with overseas universities. During this period, she was also a faculty on Ethics, CSR and International Marketing and served as a visiting faculty at the Indian Merchant Chamber, Mumbai and at St. Xaviers College, Mumbai.

Flocy earned her Master’s degree in Business Management from the Madras University in India with Marketing and Foreign Trade as her specialization. Years later, she pursued her doctorate from the Singapore Management University. Her doctoral thesis was on ‘Responsible Leadership: A Behavioural Perspective’ as an alternative form of leadership for leaders in the twenty first century.

Outside of her professional endeavours, she cherishes time with her close-knit family while enjoying lending support as a care giver to senior citizens in a retirement home. Her passion includes social service and fusion cooking and observing leadership styles. She is also fluent in 5 Indian languages.

François Bogacz heads the Learning and Innovation team of SMU-ExD, which oversees designing and delivering cutting-edge face-to-face, virtual and hybrid learning journeys for our clients, with a strong emphasis on generating a measurable and sustainable impact on participants and organizations.

François has an extensive leadership experience in various MNCs and tech start-ups as a marketing manager. In 2011, he founded one of the first companies dedicated to popularizing the findings about how the emotional, social and cognitive brains work. He facilitated workshops on this topic in the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia. He is a certified mediator and is conducting a part-time PhD research about emotions in conflict and how mediation positively impacts parties in conflict. Before coming to Singapore, he was based in Malaysia for 8 years and as a Lead Consultant Asia, he designed numerous learning journeys for junior to C-suites leaders in finance, insurance, telecom, energy and public organizations of the ASEAN region, with a specialization in multi-level programs.

He lives with his wife in Singapore, their two adult kids having left the nest and flown down under. He enjoys reading, writing and exercising in his spare time.

Dr. Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing at Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. Kumar was until recently a member-group executive council at Tata Sons. He wrote a blog post on being fired from this role. Before this, he was a Professor of Marketing and Director of Aditya Birla India Centre at London Business School. He previously served on the faculty of Harvard Business School, IMD-International Institute for Management Development (Switzerland), and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

He has authored seven books on marketing and business-related topics. He is notable for proposing the culture of "3Vs": valued customer, value proposition and value network, explained in his book Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation. He appears on the lists of Thinkers50, World's Best B-School Professors, and 50 Most Influential Business School Professors. In 2011, he received the Global Village Award by Thinkers50 for the person who contributed most to the business community's understanding of globalization and the new frontiers established by emerging markets. In 2012, he received an honorary fellowship from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Dr. Nirmalya Kumar was educated at La Martiniere Calcutta school, and received his Bachelor of Commerce degree from Calcutta University in 1980, and his Master of Commerce degree from Shivaji University in 1983. In 1986, he completed his MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and in 1991, received his Ph.D in Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management in Northwestern University.

Ser-Keng has been actively teaching, undergraduate, executive and post graduate programs since 2003. In addition to teaching, Ser-Keng is also highly experienced in designing, structuring and directing programs. Ser-Keng has been consistently placed on the Dean’s Honor List as top teaching faculty since 2003. He won the SMU Teaching Excellence Award in 2008 as the Most Promising Teacher and. He won the Best Teaching Award for MBA elective professor (2012 & 2013) & a special award for applying theory to practical settings (From the Classroom to Boardroom Award 2013) for the MBA class. He is the first faculty to be awarded the SMU Teaching Excellence Award for excellent teaching in Executive Development in 2013.  He also won the teaching excellence award for Postgraduate Professional Programs both in 2014 & 2015. In 2016, he was conferred the Commendation Medal by the President of the Republic of Singapore for his contribution to education. In 2017, he won the SMU Teaching Excellence Award for excellent teaching in Executive Development, as well as the award for the most outstanding faculty in the EMBA program, the Best Teaching Award for MBA elective professor & a special award for guiding MBA students (Lighthouse Award).

Ser-Keng’s research interest is in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), capital markets, wealth management and corporate governance in Asian firms.  His article titled “Challenges of Private Banking in Asia” has been published by the Journal of Wealth Management in the Spring 2010

Prior to his academic appointment at SMU, Ser-Keng was an investment banker.  He spent nine years in London and Hong Kong. Ser-Keng also started a family business with his siblings and has been involved in its operations since 1988. He has also been actively involved in advising small businesses via his directorship at the UOB-SMU Asian Enterprise Institute since 2006.

Ser-Keng received his Ph.D. in Finance from UNSW Business School, MBA from London Business School (LBS), Master in Business Research from UWA, and Bachelor of Accountancy (BAcc) from National University of Singapore (NUS). He is qualified for both CA and ACIS. 

Shantanu H. Bhattacharya is Professor of Operations Management at SMU. Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD from September 2002 to June 2014, and Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD from September 1998 to August 2002. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of technology management, operations management, supply chain management and new product and services development. Professor Bhattacharya is a member of INFORMS, has made several presentations on managing uncertainty in the high-technology industry, and his research has appeared in Management Science. 

He holds a PhD in Management from the University of Texas at Austin, an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in India. Prior to joining SMU and INSEAD, Professor Bhattacharya was an instructor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Les Buckley is currently an affiliate professor of strategic management with Singapore Management University, a role focused on executive development and training (since January 2015). 

He is academic director of an IE Singapore sponsored SMU course on Business Effectiveness in Asia, and has worked with Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, B2B Manufacturing and services and FMCG clients as well as Munich Business School Executive MBA.

Prior to this  he worked with Asia Pacific Breweries, a subsidiary of Heineken N.V.  and Singapore’s Fraser and Neave, from 1988 until 2014 latterly as Regional Managing Director – SE Asia/Oceania (2005-2014).  He was responsible to the Board of Directors for operational performance of businesses and breweries in Mongolia, Malaysia, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and the wider pacific, totaling 11 operating companies with ten breweries, over 1500 staff members, and turnover in excess of S$1.5 billion.  

He currently manages investments in business startups and is an advisor to consumer and B2B digital start ups in both Singapore and UK.

Born in UK and educated in NZ, UK, and USA, Dr. Buckley holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (New York), and has more than thirty years experience in commercial and operational roles in pharmaceuticals and consumer packaged goods with twenty-five years experience in Asia. 

Dr. Buckley has held board roles in private and listed companies in executive and non-executive roles. He has also experience of audit, nominating, and executive subcommittees. He has operational, manufacturing, supply chain and commercial experience in a range of Asia Pacific countries. Before becoming a Regional Managing Director, Dr. Buckley was involved in business development in North Asia and was Commercial Director for APB responsible for Tiger beer development worldwide from 2004-2008. Prior to that he was General Manager of three Asian operations.

In addition to this, Les has been involved in a range of extracurricular appointments and has been a board member and audit committee member of Singapore Government’s National Environment Agency, a board member of the Football Association of Singapore and a member of Singapore Compact for Corporate Social Responsibility’s Board. Currently he's a council member and advisor to Singapore Institute for International Affairs a world ranked geo-political and environmental think tank. 

Tan Hwee Hoon is actively involved in Executive Teaching, both in English and Chinese and has trained for major organizations such as the International SOS, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore Health Services, SingTel, SIA, Kerry Oils, Alcatel Asia Pacific etc. She also consults for organizations such as the Singapore Tourism Board, IE Singapore and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. She taught at the School of Business at the National University of Singapore from December 1996 to November 2005 and was Head of Department from 2004 to 2005. Hwee Hoon has been with the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University since December 2005. 

Hwee Hoon earned her PhD in Management from the Krannert School, Purdue University in December 1996. Hwee Hoon’s research interests are in the areas of interpersonal trust, cross cultural awareness and emotional management at the workplace. 

Hwee Hoon has published in many international journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Relations and many others. She was also the Asia-Pacific Editor of the Journal of World Business from  2000-2004.  

Gordon Perchthold is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Singapore Management University (SMU) – Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Prior to joining SMU, Gordon obtained a PhD through the University of Sydney identifying the factors that cause Multinationals to sustain successful engagement in Asia. However, the greatest part of his career of 30 years has been as a Global Partner with Deloitte Consulting followed by being an entrepreneurial consultant/advisory for his own firm, Managing Across Asia. As illustrated below in the word cloud of his relative country experiences, the greater proportion of his working life has been serving over 40 of the world’s largest multinational clients, for most, across their operations in Asia. AIA, Allianz, Commonweath Bank of Australia, Daimler Fuso, HSBC, ING, Manulife, MetLife, Prudential plc, Samsung, Scotiabank, and Telesat are representative of the clients he has served over his career.

Gordon’s client work over the decades has focused on business strategy and the operationalization of that strategy at the global, regional, and within country levels. His research in cross-cultural management and field implementation has exposed him to dozens of country operations providing a depth of practical and theory based expertise on structuring and executing multi-country initiatives. This experience provides him credibility when facilitating leadership alignment sessions of cross-cultural management teams.

Originally, born and raised in Canada, Professor Perchthold received a Bachelor of Commerce degree as well as a Specialist in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. After six years working experience with Unisys and NCR in Canada and Australia, he obtained a MBA as well as separate certifications as a teaching case writer and facilitator from the Ivey Business School of Western University in Canada. He is a member and facilitator of one of the Strategy and Risk courses of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and recently been a Non-Executive Director of Kartoza Pty Ltd, a SME service provider of FOSS Global Information Systems in Africa and Asia. 

Professor Gerry George is Dean and Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at LKCSB. He is a visiting professor at Imperial College London and Erasmus University. He also serves in an honorary role as International Dean of BML Munjal University, a new university near New Delhi.

George joined SMU from Imperial College where he was Deputy Dean of the Business School, Director of the Gandhi Centre, and Academic Director of the Elite Programme, which supports ambitious private companies through their next stage of growth and is sponsored by the London Stock Exchange. Before Imperial, he held tenured positions at the London Business School and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2013 to 2016, he served as Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, the flagship empirical journal in the field of management.

His areas of interest are in innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability and tackling grand challenges in society. An award-winning researcher and teacher, Professor George has published several articles in leading journals. He was awarded a prestigious Professorial Fellowship from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council to work on socially-inclusive innovation in areas such as natural resources, healthcare, and energy. With Simon Schillebeeckx, he has an edited book “Managing Natural Resources: Organizational Strategy, Behavior and Dynamics” (Edward Elgar, 2018). With Adam Bock, he has co-authored three books on entrepreneurship. “The Business Model Book: Design, Build and Adapt Models that Drive Business Growth” is a workbook for business model innovation (Pearson, 2018). It builds on a narrative approach on how entrepreneurs conceive and change business models. Models of Opportunity: How Entrepreneurs Design Firms to Achieve the Unexpected, (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Inventing Entrepreneurs: Technology Innovators and their Entrepreneurial Journey (Prentice Hall, 2008) addressed technology commercialization.

George is a member of the Corporate Governance Council of the Monetary Authority of Singapore tasked to rewrite the Corporate Governance Code of Singapore in 2017. He also serves on the Board of AACSB International -- The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Established in 1916, AACSB provides quality assurance, business education intelligence, and professional development services to over 1,500 member organizations and more than 785 accredited business schools worldwide. Previously, he served as a non-executive director and chaired the Risk Management Committee of India Infrastructure Finance Company (UK) Limited, a Government of India enterprise subsidiary in the UK. IIFC(UK) provides dollar denominated financing for capital equipment in large Indian infrastructure projects. For his contribution to further education and research, Professor George was awarded Fellowship of the City & Guilds of London Institute.

Professor Annie Koh is Vice President of the Office of Business Development, Singapore Management University, Professor of Finance (Practice), and Academic Director of two University-level institutes – the Business Families Institute and the International Trading Institute. Her previous portfolios include positions as Associate Dean, Lee Kong Chian School of Business and Dean, Office of Executive & Professional Education.

A notable conference speaker, panel moderator and commentator, Annie is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Regional Governance, and a board member of Family Firm Institute, Inc. In addition, she chairs the finance and investment committee of GovTech Singapore Board, and the Asian Bond Fund 2 Supervisory Committee of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. She is an appointed board member of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund since 2012 and serves on the SkillsFuture HR Sectoral Tripartite Committee, HR Certification Taskforce. Annie is also an independent director of k1 Ventures Ltd, and lead independent director of Health Management International Ltd. She also advises a number of startup firms such as JEDTrade, Stashaway and Staff-On-Demand.

A Fulbright scholar, Annie earned her PhD in International Finance from Stern School of Business, New York University (1988). Her research interests are in Family Office and Family Business, Investor Behaviour, Alternate Investments and Enterprise Risk Management. She co-authored Financial Management: Theory and Practice, An Asia Edition (2014), and Financing Internationalisation – Growth Strategies for Successful Companies (2004), and authored a number of Asian family business cases and survey reports.

Prof Koh has been awarded the Singapore Public Administration Medal, Bronze (2010) and Silver (2016), for her contributions to the education and public sectors.

Dr. Srinivas K. Reddy is Professor of Marketing and Director, Center for Marketing Excellence, Academic Director, LVMH-SMU Luxury Brand Initiative, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University. He served as the Associate Dean of General Management overseeing the MBA and the Executive MBA programs. Previously, he was the Executive Director and Group Head, Corporate Strategy and Leadership Development at Maytas. Prior to the stint at Maytas he was the Robert O. Arnold Professor of Business and the Director of the Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies, Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He holds M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees in Business Administration from Columbia University. Dr. Reddy was on the faculties of New York University’s Stern School of Business, Columbia University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Business School.

Dr. Reddy's expertise is in branding, innovation, new product development, marketing and competitive strategy involving new brands and services. Dr. Reddy’s research has been published in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Social Networks, Statistical Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Marketing Letters, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Decision Support Systems and Journal of Business Research. In 2006, he has been awarded the IBM’s prestigious SUR grant to study corporate innovativeness and innovation conversion. He has consulted and taught executive programs for IBM, Coca-Cola Company, United Parcel Service, Miller Brewing, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Satyam Computer Services, Chase, Turner Broadcasting, Cox Interactive Media, Equitable, Ford Foundation, Price Waterhouse Coopers, MasterCard, Unilever, Sembcorp, MSIG, SingHealth, Randstad, Schneider Electric, and Infineon.

He has been recognized for his outstanding teaching and was the recipient of Award for Teaching Excellence in 1994. He was nominated as the MBA Teacher of the Year in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2005. Dr. Reddy was the winner of Teaching Excellence in Executive Development in 2015 and was one of 3 at SMU nominated for this award in 2014 and 2015. He is the recipient of MBA Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. Dr. Reddy’s case (Gillette’s “Shave India Movement”: Razor Sharp Against the Stubble) was one of the winners in the 2013 Emerald Emerging Markets Case competition. This case was also the winner at the prestigious EFMD Case Competition (2014). Two of his cases (Oreo in China and Gillette in India) have been featured in Financial Times in 2013.

Dr. Reddy along with Professor Krishna Palepu of Harvard Business School was the advisor to the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh (Mr. Chandrababu Naidu), India on the state’s Vision 2020 program for economic development. Professor Reddy was the founding director of Quantum National Bank, Atlanta in 1995. He was also the co-founder of enLeague, a startup company involved in developing technolgical solutions for enterprise peer-to-peer networks. enLeague was the first startup to be funded by the Coca-Cola’s incubator Fizzion. He was on the advisory board of Navigauge, a radio audience dynamics/telematics company, and Panacea, an electronic medical records company. He was a Director of MRII (Marketing Research Institute International 2001-2007) and is currently an Advisory Board member of GfK Academy, Germany and Percipient.