Jim Whitney

Professor Jim Whitney has been teaching at Champlain College since 2001. He currently teaches strategy in the undergraduate and MBA programs; he has taught a variety of other business courses as well, at Champlain and other New England colleges, drawing on 25 years of management experience prior to launching his teaching career. His business experience ranges from financial analysis and problem solving at companies as diverse as a Wall Street law firm and a Fortune 500 company, to successive stints as Director of Sales, North America, at two manufacturers with global reach. His business travels have taken him to Europe, Asia and South America on multiple occasions. After many years of on-the-job learning (his undergraduate degree from Fordham University was in philosophy), he completed an online MBA from University of Phoenix while travelling over 50,000 job-related miles a year; more recently he completed post-graduate work at McGill University in Montreal.

Jim lives in Waterbury with his wife and three cats. He enjoys biking, hiking and snowshoeing with his wife; the cats enjoy walking across the keyboard while Jim is working on his online courses. Jim serves on the boards of the Vermont Mozart Festival and the Aspergillus Association of America, which he helped create with a former student. He has previously served on the boards of local professional and national industry associations. He continues to provide management consulting services to companies through Champlain's Workforce Development group, and his own consulting practice, StrateQi. Jim is active in the Strategic Management Society's strategy practice interest group, and is a member of the Academy of Management.

Strategy is Jim's passion, because as he tells his students, "It requires juggling all the balls in the business curriculum, marketing, finance, accounting, operations...simultaneously engaging in creative thinking and critical analysis, while keeping an eye on all the details of what is happening in the world around you. It stretches every aspect of your thinking, changing and challenging you every day." Some highlights of Jim's academic career have been mentoring undergraduate students both in his Burlington class and in a class being taught in Mumbai, India, as they competed together in an online strategy simulation game, and teaching courses to students in Tel Aviv, via a real-time, two-way, closed circuit television connection. He consistently looks for ways to bring global issues and a global outlook to his classrooms.

Many of Professor Whitney's students remain in touch after graduation; he has an active, if informal, career coaching practice, with graduates dropping by his office or e-mailing him on a regular basis. His MBA students, all of whom are working professionals, routinely bring their workplace challenges to the class discussions. Jim relishes the opportunity to confront these real-world situations, as he believes theory must always be tested by practical application, and business teachers must continually demonstrate their ability to go beyond textbook cases and address real problems in the workplace.

What most of Professor Whitney's students and colleagues didn't know about him, is that he...
• Was once a ski bum in Park City, Utah
• is a classically trained chef
• has worked as a professional chocolatier
• has published numerous articles in trade journal in the U.S. and Canada
• has been a featured speaker at various national trade conferences
• worked with VISTA on a project helping the mentally handicapped
• graduated from college at age 19
• helped launch a company in the mid-80s, developing speech-enabled computers for the blind
• has donated over 20 gallons of blood at the Red Cross
• whitewater rafted the same rivers as where Deliverance was filmed

TAGS: Faculty/Staff, Business Division, Accounting, Business, International Business, Legal Studies, Marketing