McLean Parks has 'low tolerance for boredom'

Business school's first woman with tenure blazes divergent trails from classroom to Boundary Waters

Judi McLean Parks, Ph.D., enjoys family heirlooms, including the desk at left, used by her grandmother and great-grandmother. Both taught in the same one-room schoolhouse.

Trailblazing seems to come naturally to Judi McLean Parks, Ph.D. Whether she's talking about becoming the first tenured female at the John M. Olin School of Business as of July 1 or tracking and photographing bears in the Boundary Waters, a sense of adventure punctuates her words.

"I have a low tolerance for boredom," she said with an infectious laugh. Maybe that's why, as professor of organizational behavior, she's able to balance research, teaching two or three courses (including a class in the business school's London Study Program), leading Ph.D. seminars and serving as an organizational consultant.

McLean Parks deals in down-to-earth issues, teaching courses like "Negotiation and Conflict Management," among others. "We all use negotiating skills -- with our kids, our boss, or whomever," she said, "and everyone can improve in this domain."

John Reidy, who took the class and graduated from the Professional Master of Business Administration program in May, affirmed its value. "We learned to negotiate always from a position of strength," he said. "If you can't walk away from the table, you're in a weak position."

Reidy, senior compliance manager at Edward Jones Investments in St. Louis, said McLean Parks was very confident, very knowledgeable and an extremely tough negotiator. Many students go to McLean Parks for guidance in negotiating job offers. "You knew you never wanted to be up against her in a negotiation," Reidy said, "because you knew you'd be outdone. The anecdotes she told about her experiences in negotiation were powerful."

McLean Parks' experiences have been richly diverse. "I wasn't your typical student," she said. "I started out in classical music, as a singer, but I tired of hours of scales and arpeggios a day." Early in her career, she was a service representative for "Ma Bell," where she joined a union for the first time. Later she became a consultant in commercial and residential real estate and a free-lance computer programmer. "I've been in the trenches, not just the ivory tower," she said.

Back to school

As an older student with two children, McLean Parks earned a bachelor of business administration degree from Iowa State University in Ames. She went on to receive a master of arts in management sciences and a doctoral degree in organizational behavior, both from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

"She was a terrific student," said Ed Conlon, Ph.D., now the Edward Fredrick Sorin Society Professor of Management at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. While he was at the University of Iowa, Conlon advised McLean Parks about her dissertation. "She was born to do what she's doing," he added. "Unlike many others, she understood what a research degree was all about, and she got involved in research right away. She hit the ground running, and she was a hard worker with superb skills."

McLean Parks, recently named to the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review, has won many awards for her research and serves as a board member or reviewer for six journals.

"Research is a path to discovery," she said, "and teaching is a path to validation." Teaching runs in McLean Parks' maternal bloodline. Her mother, Mary McLean, who was a great influence on her, was a teacher for 50 years. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were also teachers. "I never imagined I'd be a teacher," she said, "because I don't have much patience and couldn't imagine teaching little kids. Later, I realized you could teach adults, who didn't have peanut butter or other sticky things on their fingers."

Getting up close and personal with a black bear, Judi McLean Parks and her daughter, Heatheryann, enjoy a fall trip to Ely, Minn., one of many to track and photograph bears in the Boundary Waters areas.

Before joining the faculty here in 1995, McLean Parks taught at the Industrial Relations Center at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, and was a visiting scholar at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and at the Institute d'Administration des Entreprises, Université Jean Moulin Lyon III, Lyon, France.

"Teaching and living in France was a great test-market for what I teach in 'Managing in a Multicultural Environment,'" she said. Almost every student, she observed, will be involved in either a multinational firm or in a merger or acquisition sometime during his or her career. "Whether one's learning to live in blended cultures such as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, Wall Street and health care, accounting and consulting, or navigating cultural and gender differences, it's important to learn how to get along with people, to avoid faux pas."

McLean Parks knows how to keep her courses interesting. For instance, when she teaches "Organizational Behavior," she uses an exercise simulating an Australian bush fire in order to teach group decision making.

She also helps students learn what motivates employees. "Money is not a primary motivator for everybody," she noted. Probably what's most important to an employee, McLean Parks believes, is the psychological contract he or she has with an employer. "This contract -- the employee's belief in a set of reciprocal obligations -- is not legally binding," she added, "but when it's broken by supervisors or co-workers, it leads to overt or covert acts of revenge in the workplace." McLean Parks is a noted researcher, consultant and commentator on revenge and violence in the workplace.

Colleague Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Ph.D., assistant professor of organizational behavior at the business school, shares similar academic interests. Thomas-Hunt, who researches diversity in groups, conflict and conflict resolution in the workplace, said McLean Parks has been very helpful to her. "She's been a great mentor for me, and she exemplifies the word 'collegial,'" Thomas-Hunt said.

Diversity also applies to McLean Parks' personal interests, which include genealogy. "It has only been recently that I have been bitten by the genealogy bug," she said. "I knew I was hooked when I began finding stories of murder, mayhem and even a witch trial in the 1600s." McLean Parks has found more than 3,000 names of ancestors of her mother, whose family was among the first immigrants to North America from England and the Netherlands.

Gourmet with gusto

She has applied the same gusto to gourmet cooking. "I've collected about 700 cookbooks, because I read cookbooks like other people read novels," she said. "I collect ideas, but I don't follow recipes." Her favorite dishes include "Michael's Nectarine Pasta," which "sounds awful but is wonderful," and "Indian Pudding Soufflé," which she has cooked on a wood-burning stove and served at Thanksgiving. (Recipes for both are on her Web site at www.olin.
wustl.edu/faculty/mcleanparks/.)

When it comes to her career, McLean Parks is perfecting her own recipe for success. "Academe, paralleling industry, is fairly conservative," she said, "but I like what I do -- and one day I'd like one of those endowed chairs."