“If there was a Mount Rushmore for strategic management professors, Dr. Mike Hitt would surely be a part of it.” That’s what Dr. Dave Ketchen, Lowder Eminent Scholar and Professor of Management at Auburn University, thinks of Dr. Hitt. Auburn College of Business faculty and PhD students have the opportunity to see what Dr. Ketchen means Friday, Feb. 8, when Dr. Hitt speaks in Lowder Hall’s Room 14 from 10:45 a.m. to noon. Dr. Hitt is Distinguished Professor and Joe B. Foster Chair of Business Leadership at Texas A&M University. The Times Higher Education recently ranked Mike among the top scholars in Economics, Finance, and Management, and a 2012 study by the Academy of Management listed him as the 15th most influential management scholar of all time. Dr. Hitt said he planned to discuss research that he has been working on for the past several years. “I’ve been trying to study entrepreneur firms and larger, established firms and see what they have to do to be successful in different business environments,” he said. His address Friday is titled “Institutional Polycentricity, Firm Strategies and Performance” and will feature a number of different business management-related topics, including globalization and internationalization efforts; formal and informal institutions and how the behaviors of each impact business strategies and performance. Dr. Hitt said, “Regulations, laws, economic policies, and so forth, vary a lot across different countries.” Dr. Brian Connelly, Auburn University Associate Professor of Management who earned his PhD at Texas A&M, said one of Dr. Hitt’s PhD seminars in strategic management at Texas A&M “shaped me as a scholar.” “He brings an unparalleled depth of insight to conversations about firms, their environments, and how they compete with one another,” Dr. Connelly said of Dr. Hitt. “Also, it is obvious why he has won so many awards for being a top educator, because he cares about his students. Dr. Hitt has been instrumental to building the foundations of strategic management as a discipline since its inception in the early 1980s. There are few in the academic community who have done as much as he to further our understanding of corporate strategy, to develop young scholars, and to make our research accessible to managers and those studying to be managers.” Dr. Hitt was complimentary of the Auburn College of Business faculty, and considers Dr. Connelly to be “a very talented, nice young scholar,” and Dr. Ketchen to be “a leader in the field” of business management. “They are excellent teachers and mentors for young men and women, and I’d say that their students would say the same,” Dr. Hitt said. Dr. Hitt is a fellow and former president of the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society. He also has works published in elite journals in marketing, operations management, entrepreneurship and international business. “Not only is Mike Hitt a world renowned scholar and teacher, he is a humble and kind person,” Dr. Ketchen said. “That combination of accomplishment and humility is very rare. Mike has long been and remains one of my role models.” A reception in the Alabama Power room will immediately follow Dr. Hitt’s presentation.