What does it take to be a great business teacher?
The MBA website Poets & Quants found that Haas Associate Professor Terry Taylor is among the world's 40 business school professors under 40 who have what it takes to inspire and instruct today's MBA students.
Building on his success in the classroom, Taylor also recently took on the role of faculty lead for the school's new Innovative Leader curriculum. In this role, he will work to support the integration of the curriculum at Berkeley-Haas. This will include helping to ensure that courses that satisfy the experiential learning requirement meet specific standards.
Taylor, who joined Haas in 2007, teaches operations and also studies supply chain management. In 2009, he won the school's Earl F. Cheit Excellence in Teaching award. Before he came to Haas, students called operations the least relevant course in the MBA curriculum. After his arrival, it shot up to the most relevant.
“Professor Taylor doesn’t just teach Operational Leadership, he personifies it," Bernie Murphy, MBA 11, told Poets & Quants. Taylor gives students countless simple but non-trivial examples of what he means by mitigating the "pain of variability," through everything from color-coded handouts to pre-designed white-board diagrams, Murphy explained.
But Taylor has an infectious eagerness and fun side, too. Saumil Shah, MBA 10, called Taylor's Operations course his favorite class at Haas. "Believe it or not, I am a huge fan of Operations," Shah said in an online admissions chat. "Taylor taught many concepts through Seinfeld videos."