Jackson Nickerson

Jackson Nickerson is an American academic who studies leadership, organizations, and strategy. Nickerson is the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy in Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. He also is the associate Dean and Director of Brookings Executive Education and is a non-resident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Nickerson grew up in Weymouth, Massachusetts, attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, followed by a Masters in Mechanical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley He worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, before returning to Berkeley for a Master in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business. He later returned to Hass for a Ph.D., simultaneously working for six years as a consultant for the Law and Economics Consulting Group.

Nickerson was appointed assistant professor at Olin Business School in 1996, promoted to associate professor (2001), full professor (2005), and the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy (2007). After becoming strategy group chair in 2008, he was appointed Director of Brookings Executive Education in 2009 and became its associate dean in 2010. In 2009 he became a non-resident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and was the first Senior Visiting Fellow at the Grameen Foundation in 2010 and 2011. From 2013 through 2014 he wrote the leadership columns “Ask EIG: Leadership insights for Federal managers” for Government Executive Online and has been a speaker for the Institute of Management Studies since 2014.

Nickerson’s early research built upon Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics to predict the antecedents and performance consequences of organizational choices in a wide variety of empirical settings and industries. Along with Todd Zenger, he introduced the concepts of organizational vacillation and envy as foundations to firm boundaries, and is credited with introducing the Problem Finding and Problem Solving Perspective, which provides a knowledge-based foundation for a theory of firm boundaries, organizational choice, entrepreneurship, and the design of group processes to overcome biases.

In 1995 Nickerson co-founded the Intellectual Capital Management Group. In 2006 he co-founde NFORMD.NET, a new media company that through its subsidiary StudentSuccess.org provides sexual assault prevention training at over 350 colleges and universitiesand to the US Army. Between 2009 and 2012, he was a board member of Clean Tech Bio-fuels.

Nickerson is a co-creator of Critical Thinking@Olin, an approach to teaching critical thinking that won the inaugural MBA Roundtable Innovator Award]. The approach is taught to other business schools a part of AACSB’s Curriculum Development Series. In conjunction with AACSB, he developed Leading in the Academic Enterprisean approach for developing leaders in academia. Through Brookings Executive Education he developed an launched Leading Thinkingan approach to leadership in which inquiry and critical thinking are the core.

• Leading in Government: Practical advice to leadership questions from the front lines'. J.A. Nickerson, Brookings Executive Education, 2016.
• Leading Change from the Middle: A Practical Guide to Building Extraordinary Capabilities'. J.A. Nickerson, Brookings Press, 2014.
• Tackling Wicked Government Problems: A Practical Guide for Enterprise Leaders . J.A. Nickerson and R. Sanders (eds.), Brookings Press, 2013.
• Leading Change in a Web 2.1 World: How ChangeCasting Builds Trust, Creates Understanding, and Accelerates Organizational Change] J.A. Nickerson, Brookings Press, 2010.
• Economic Institutions of Strategy. J. A. Nickerson and B. S. Silverman (eds.), Advances in Strategic Management (Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2009.

• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• [5]