Jay B. Barney is a Presidential Professor of Strategic Management and holds the Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the Eccles School of Business at The University of Utah. He also has an appointment as a Senior Research Scholar at INSEAD and serves as the Academic Co-Director of the Center for Business, Health, and Prosperity at the University of Utah.
He received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University and his master’s and doctorate from Yale University.
After completing his education, Professor Barney joined the faculty at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. He moved to Texas A&M University in 1986, The Ohio State University in 1994—where he held the Chase Chair in Strategic Management--and The University of Utah in 2012. He was a visiting scholar at INSEAD in 2016, and a visiting professor at the Said School of Business at Oxford University in 2017.
Professor Barney teaches strategic management at the University of Utah. He also teaches classes on entrepreneurship and economic development during which he leads groups of students to Bolivia, Peru, and Ghana where they work to improve the performance of aspiring entrepreneurs in those countries. He also has taught in a variety of executive training programs at the University of Utah, Ohio State, Texas A&M, UCLA, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, the University of Michigan, Bocconi University (in Milan, Italy), and for the consulting firm McKinsey and Company. Professor Barney received the George Robbins Teaching Award at UCLA in 1983, the Association of Former Students’ Distinguished Teaching Award at Texas A&M in 1992, various MBA, Ph.D., and Executive MBA teaching awards at Ohio State in 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2004, and was nominated for a university teaching award at the University of Utah in 2016.
Professor Barney's research focuses on the relationship between firm resources and capabilities and sustained competitive advantage. He has also published work on how entrepreneurs create the business opportunities they exploit. He has published over 100 articles in a variety of journals, including the Academy of Management Review, the Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, the Journal of Management, the Harvard Business Review, and the Sloan Management Review. By 2021, Professor Barney’s research had been cited over 200,000 times. He has been on the editorial boards at the Academy of Management Review and the Strategic Management Journal, has been Associate Editor at the Journal of Management, senior editor at Organization Science, Co-Editor at the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, and editor-in-chief of the Academy of Management Review.
Professor Barney has also delivered scholarly papers at the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School of Business, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, The London Business School, and at over seventy other universities around the world, and has published seven books: Organizational Economics (with William G. Ouchi), Managing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Behavior (with Ricky Griffin), Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage (now in its fourth edition), Strategic Management and Competitive Advantage (with Bill Hesterly, now in its sixth edition), Resource-based Theory (with Delwyn Clark), What I Didn’t Learn in Business School: How Strategy Works in the Real World (with Trish Clifford), and The Cambridge Handbook of Stakeholder Theory (with Jeff Harrison, Ed Freeman, and Rob Phillips).
Professor Barney has won numerous awards for his research. In addition to holding honorary appointments at universities in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and China, he has received three honorary doctorate degrees—at the University of Lund (in Sweden), at the Copenhagen Business School, and at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas (in Madrid, Spain). He won the Irwin Outstanding Educator Award for the Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy of Management in 2005, has been elected as a Fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society, and received the Academy of Management Award for Outstanding Scholarship in 2010, the highest award for research achievement in the field of management. He has also been awarded the Penrose Prize for Trailblazing Research in Management (2019, co-sponsored by INSEAD and the European Academy of Management), the Foundational Paper Award for the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management (2019, with co-author Sharon Alvarez), the C.K Prahalad Scholar Practitioner Award (2020, sponsored by the Strategic Management Society), the John Fayerweather Eminent Scholar Award (2020, sponsored by the Academy of International Business), and the Distinguished Scholarship Award (2021, co-awarded with Margaret Peteraf, sponsored by the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management).
Professor Barney has consulted with a wide variety of public and private organizations, including Westinghouse Electric, the Masonite Corporation, McDonnell-Douglas, Wells Fargo Bank, Honeywell, Mead, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Tenneco, Arco, Koch Industries Inc., Nationwide, The Columbus Public Schools, The Ohio State University Medical Center, Lancaster Colony Corporation, Bob Evans Restaurants, R.G. Barry and Company, and others. His consulting focuses on strategic analysis and strategy implementation. He also is a Founding Fellow of the Society for Progress, a group of philosophers, economists, business school professors, and senior business executives dedicated to finding ways to resolve conflicts between economic and social progress. Professor Barney has also served on advisory boards for several privately held and not-for-profit companies, on the board of directors for one publicly traded firm, and as an advisor to several boards of publicly traded firms.
Professor Barney is married (Kim) and has three children and twelve grandchildren.
