Teaching
Michael teaches primarily at Columbia Business School. He co-designed and co-teaches the core class that begins the MBA curriculum, called LEAD.
He brought a behavioral-science-based negotiation elective to CBS and launched an associated post-doc program that helped the course grow into the most widely taken elective. He occasionally teaches an elective on international negotiation to EMBA students and he teaches short courses on negotiation to executive education students.
He has created several other successful electives at Columbia. In 2008 he developed a class on teamwork in the context of mountain expeditions, which ran for many years in partnership with NOLS. It has since evolved into extracurricular trip. In 2014 he launched The Leader’s Voice a practice-based class focusing on emerging genres of leadership communication, which quickly became the second most taken elective at the school. Morris has been recognized with the school’s award for Innovation in the Classroom, a finalist in 2006 for the negotiation class and the winner in 2016 for communication class.
Psychology students
Supervised Independent Research in Cultural Psychology
CU course PSYC 3950 UN sec:02
As an Affiliated Professor at Columbia University Psychology Department, Morris occasionally lectures in psychology classes and supervises students each year in independent studies and honors projects. Students who want to work as a Research Assistant for independent study credit should first contact the lab manager and investigate whether there are current projects that fit with your interests and skill set. Then you can register and be approved in order to get course credit for the activity.
For more information: https://psychology.columbia.edu/content/research-opportunities
MBA Students
Lead: People, Teams, Organizations
CBS Course B6500
This course focuses on the skills sets needed to elicit high commitment and productivity from people and groups. Awareness of one's own values, beliefs, decision-making tendencies and behaviors is seen as a crucial first step in becoming a leader. Thus, a significant portion of the course consists of activities designed to enhance students' self-awareness. The course provides students with the interpersonal skills needed to motivate key actors in the workplace and to manage group dynamics so as to create synergy among group members. Methods of instruction include individualized feedback, cases, role-plays and experiential exercises.
The Leader's Voice: Communication Skills for Leading Organizations
CBS Course B8538
Leadership roles can involve a wide range of communication challenges: coaching a colleague, convincing investors of your brand, rallying an auditorium of new employees, working the room at an industry event, handling tough questions from the media, running team meetings in ways that elicit candid conversation and learning. While all of us at CBS are strong communicators, few of us are adept at all these different kinds of communication. The goal of this class is to broaden your repertoire, to make you a more versatile communicator who can adapt your way of communicating to meet many different challenges. The world is full of communication experts: actors, screenwriters, coaches, political speechwriters, networkers, public relations experts, diplomats and so forth. This class draws on these different crafts and professions looking for tools and methods that help in the kinds of situations business leaders face. We aim to develop two kinds of knowledge--conceptual understanding and procedural skill.
CBS Course B7583
Our days are filled with negotiation and conflict, from everyday disputes to job negotiations, from coalition-building to boardroom bargaining. This course aims to help students improve their skills in two fundamental ways. One is knowledge-oriented: students learn concepts and frameworks for analyzing and preparing for bargaining. A second route is practice-oriented: students engage in a sequence of hands-on activities, practicing and reflecting, building self-awareness, and honing their skills for creating and claiming value.
Leadership Expedition
This class centers on a 10-day field-based training that teaches leadership (as well as ecology and outdoor skills) in Chile an Patagonia, one of the world’s most beautiful and diverse mountain environments and a growing site of ecotourism. The terrain is rugged and remote; the weather can be cold and wet.The phrase “out of your comfort zone” applies in its most literal sense. Through this you will be challenged to lead a group, make decisions under uncertainty, learn from experience, express yourself clearly, listen closely, and motivate your team. Campus session prepare students for the leadership and team work challenges ahead,through exercises and simulations. Consistent with a global immersion course, they also provide some context on mountaineering, the ecotourism industry, and the Chilean societal and business context. What is the mission of ecotourism firms such as NOLS?How do the forms of ecotourism emerging in Patagonia reflect to the larger Chilean economic context?
This is no longer offered as a for-credit class but the field component is offered as an extracurricultural trip under the Chazen Institute: https://business.columbia.edu/chazen/nols-patagonia-leadership-expedition
Collaborating on a speedy shelter
Team, fording a river
First aid rescue
EMBA Students
Advanced Negotiations: Negotiating Globally
Executives are increasingly called upon to negotiate globally. Negotiating globally means reaching deals or resolving disputes with counter-parties based in different countries and shaped by different cultures. This demand is obvious in global firms that seek to tap talent pools and capture market segments in many different countries. Yet it also present in more traditional multinationals, which seek ever-closer coordination between national divisions, and even in small localized firms, which nevertheless may look abroad for cost-competitive vendors and process off-shoring. An international or global dimension introduces additional challenges to a negotiation: differences in cultural norms of behavior make it harder for negotiators to read each other’s signals, differences in legal and banking systems necessitate different contractual mechanisms, and different structures of government and corporate institutions mean that parties will be constrained by different kinds of constituencies and audiences.
(This class is not currently offered due to my capacity constraints)
Ph.D. Students
Communicating Management Research
CBS Course MGMTB9516
This PhD Course is designed to give Management PhD students exposure to and experience with techniques on two commonly underappreciated and neglected parts of PhD matriculation: [1] how to
write interesting and important introductions and front-ends of articles; and [2] how to do a great (conference) presentation of one’s research. Accordingly, our focus will be on the written and oral
communication of academic work. This course requires reading and the discussion of readings, but it is fundamentally a “learning-by-doing” course. My approach is to have you undergo an iterative process where you (a) communicate your research, (b) receive feedback, (c) revise your communication, and then cycle through this process again. The goal (and the metric I used to evaluate the effectiveness of this course) is to start you on the path of being among the best communicators of your generation.
Advanced Seminar on Socially Shared Cognition
CBS Course MGMTB9517
This course is designed for doctoral students in business, psychology, anthropology, sociology and other fields. It focuses on contemporary theories and methods in the study of shared or distributed knowledge and related psychological and social processes.
Executive Education
Negotiation Strategies: Creating and Maximizing Value
Open enrollment, non-degree courses for professionals. Click above for all sessions of the program.
Extra-Curricular Programing
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Morris serves on the standing committee of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program and on its evaluation committee.
Leadership Lab
To guide Columbia Business School’s broadened emphasis on cultivating managers and leaders (not just financiers), Michael founded Columbia’s “Program on Social Intelligence” later renamed “Leadership Lab” to infuse the curriculum and extracurricular activities with evidence-based teaching about leadership in its broadest sense.
“Broadening the Definition of Intelligence” via Chazen Global Insights. View Article.
“The Program on Social Intelligence” featured in The Wall Street Journal. View article.
Re-Orientation event to bolster community. View article.
