Marjorie Lyles, professor of international strategic management at the Kelley School of Business and OneAmerica Chair in Business Administration, has been selected as the PWC Strategy & Eminent Scholar by the International Management Division of the Academy of Management.
“This award recognizes the lifetime achievement in the international management area, and it is our great honor to have Professor Lyles as a recipient this year,” said Sea-Jin Chang, chairman of the International Management Division. “Her empirical work, including those in the context of China, has been very influential to international management scholars.”
Lyles will be recognized at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Vancouver, British Columbia, in early August.
“Professor Lyles is one of the top international strategy scholars in the world,” said Philip. L. Cochran, executive associate dean Indianapolis for the Kelley School of Business. “She’s really helped internationalize the Kelley School and the curriculum and has been part of Indiana University’s internationalization efforts, as well.”
With more than 30 years of experience in international business research, Lyles has worked with firms, both in the United States and abroad, to study the influences of joint ventures, alliances and partnerships on company management, strategy and performance. At Kelley, Lyles teaches a unique course that allows students to travel to China to consult with Chinese companies transitioning to free market policies and to meet with other businesses in China.
“A lot of our students are transformed by the experience of traveling to China,” Cochran said. “They’re gaining a whole new outlook on the world. To be able to see what’s happening in this increasingly important part of the world is pretty phenomenal. And that’s a direct result of Marjorie’s leadership and expertise in the field of international management.”
In 2013, Lyles was elected president of the Strategic Management Society, the first female president in the society’s 33-year history. That same year, Sun Yat-sen University in China nominated Lyles for the prestigious Chang Jiang Scholar Award, the Chinese government’s highest award to scholars.
She credited her Strategic Management Society election in large part to the funding from the OneAmerica Chair.
“The Chair has been wonderful to have,” said Lyles, who was the first female management professor at the Kelley School. “It has allowed me to go to meetings, be part of the editorial board and really get to know the membership. The extra funding for research, the ability to have additional access to professional societies and meetings, have all been thanks to the OneAmerica Chair. The recognition that has come with having the Chair is really very humbling.”
Lyles was an assistant professor of business administration at Kelley from 1977 to 1982 before leaving the school to become a faculty member at the University of Illinois (1982-87) and Ball State University (1987-90). She was recruited back to Kelley in 1990 and is the longest-tenured faculty member on the school’s Indianapolis campus. In 2011, Lyles received the John W. Ryan Award from Indiana University for her distinguished contributions to international programs, teaching and research.
Lyles has received two grants from the National Science Foundation – one for research work in Hungary and the other for a project dealing with how a large multinational corporation manages alliances. The research in Hungary explored whether local firms acquired knowledge from foreign companies after the transition from Communism to a capitalist economy, and how that knowledge affected the local companies’ performance.
The research resulted in several publications, most notably a 1996 article in the Journal of International Business Studies. The article was selected for the journal’s “Decade Award,” recognizing it as the article from 1996 having the most impact on business during that year.
In addition to her academic work, Lyles has also worked with governmental, nonprofit and corporate entities across the globe. She has consulted with USIS, World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, United Nations Development Programme and private firms in Malaysia, Hungary, Vietnam, Poland, People’s Republic of China and Indonesia on international strategies, education development projects, infrastructure projects, the development of the private sector and needs assessment for management training. She also serves as a consultant to domestic firms pursuing international strategies.