Let’s get one thing straight: I’m usually very serious in the classroom.
But Ron was always too funny and had a peculiar flair for drama that made it very hard for me to ever keep a straight face in his classes. He taught us Greek for 3 hours every Monday night—sorry, I meant he taught us TEM 401: Economics, Marketing, and Strategy—but to a bunch of engineers and science geeks, it seemed like Greek, at least at first.
Oh… Let me back up a little bit and give some quick background information. Ron Goettler is an award winning, highly motivated, witty, dedicated, and seasoned professor. He was an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business before becoming the James N. Doyle, Sr. Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Simon Business School in 2012. He had earned a BA in Economics at Miami University and a PhD in Economics from Yale University. It might also interest you to know that his research has been published in various top academic journals, and one of his papers won the NYSE award for the best paper on equity trading at the 2004 Western Finance Association Meeting.
So back to the point I was making… I remember Ron pausing during a lesson to strike a pose and grin because my classmate was trying to take a quick iPhone picture of the graphs Ron used to illustrate long-run average cost and marginal cost (just to mention a random example that isn’t even the funniest). There was virtually no day that he didn’t crack us all up except for the days we had to sweat it out taking the exams. His exam questions are very thorough, so much so that even after he graciously added some extra minutes after a couple of hours, nobody moved.
In my final estimation, although the course was quite fast paced and intense (and we were tired because it was a late class), he had a way of keeping us engaged and entertained while effectively communicating the new ideas. I learned a lot from Ron’s class, and I believe it provided us with a very sound foundation for navigating the nuances of managing new technical ventures.
– Koye Alaba ’13 (MS)