Before he was a distinguished business school professor, Euvin Naidoo was a distinguished banker, holding senior leadership roles at two global pan-African banks. He was also a partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), co-leading Banking, Insurance, and Public Sector practices for the continent.
Three moments led him to the classroom. The first was in 2003, when Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter invited him to help write the case “Nelson Mandela: Change Leader,” connecting Mandela’s disciplined nation-building to the strategic dilemmas facing global executives.
The second came at Davos, when Oxford Saïd’s then dean Peter Tufano publicly announced the school’s first course on doing business in Africa. Immediately after walking off the stage, Tufano asked Naidoo: Can you build it? The course filled to capacity within days and had to be expanded several times
The third came during a day spent alone with Stephen Hawking, reading him the Mandela case and newspaper articles as Hawking prepared to meet Mandela himself. Surrounded that evening by Hawking, friends, and Nobel laureates, Naidoo saw with clarity that teaching leaders is fundamentally about cultivating humility, curiosity, and resilience.
Euvin Naidoo, Thunderbird School of Global Management
“Teaching is a mutual learning journey. Students deepen your understanding just as much as you deepen theirs,” Naidoo tells Poets&Quants.
Naidoo was a senior lecturer for two years at his alma mater, Harvard Business School, where he pioneered and co-launched the school’s first Short Intensive Program (SIP) on agility. In 2021, he joined Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management as the Distinguished Professor of Practice in Global Accounting, Risk and Agility. He is now launching the Thunderbird Case Lab, an initiative designed to bring simulations, case writing, and immersive learning directly into the classroom.
As a business school professor, Naidoo is grateful for the moments when curiosity sparks something unexpected.
“When a single question shifts an entire discussion or when someone spots a pattern that others might miss,” he says. “I’m thankful for environments where ideas collide and different disciplines meet, where a scientist, an artist, and a strategist can approach the same challenge and reveal entirely new possibilities.”
PRESENTING P&Q’s BEST UNDERGRADUATE PROFESSORS
Naidoo is just one of several professors on our 2025 list of the 50 Best Undergraduate Business School Professors to forge a unique and inspiring path to management academia.
To curate the list, the editorial team at Poets&Quants individually evaluated more than 1,200 nominations from students, alumni, colleagues, and administrators describing the incredible impact each professor has had on classrooms, their departments, and business at large. Altogether, nearly 200 individual professors were nominated.
Each professor was assigned a 1-to-10 score based on research and teaching. For research (given a 30% weight), we considered the volume of a professor’s Google Scholar citations, major media attention, research and writing awards, and impact on industry and their fields of study. For teaching (70% weight), we considered all nominations, teaching awards and innovations, student impact and mentorship, and service to their departments, schools, and universities.
VARIED PATHS TO BUSINESS EDUCATION
The human cost of failed leadership ultimately led Mustafa Akben to Elon University’s Love School of Business. Completing Turkey’s mandatory military service, Akben met people the system had left behind, including adults who could not read or write.
The turning point came when a fellow soldier was ordered to guard the building where his own brother had died in a preventable workplace fire. It was a loss that “shocked me into responsibility,” says Akben, 37, assistant professor of management and Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration across Elon.
“I realized that a good manager in one company would have limited reach, yet might be mighty. I dreamed of doing more,” he says.
He became a business professor and scholar to teach “generations of students to inspire, motivate, and protect their teams, trust that they can make a positive difference, and help countless others become the best leaders they can be, honoring those lost and preventing the future malpractice of leadership.”
Beth L. Fossen, Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business
Beth L. Fossen shifted from political campaign management and consulting in Washington, D.C. to teaching and studying marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. In a recent paper, she and her coauthor find that dialing back the emotional language in political ads and communication can actually boost engagement among diverse audiences — a counterintuitive result in an era dominated by outrage-driven media.
“I love working with curious people and having rich discussions about the business world with people who care,” says Fossen, 38, associate professor of marketing and the Eli Lilly and Company Faculty Fellow. “I feel so fortunate to be in academia and to teach Kelley students. They are truly exceptional.”
And Alex Budak, 41, was a changemaker long before he started teaching the class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Budak is co-founder of StartSomeGood, a global platform which has raised more than $12 million for social entrepreneurs to launch and scale new impact initiatives in more than 50 countries.
His Berkeley course is based on ideas outlined in his 2022 bestselling book, Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level, which is being translated into 27 languages. Inc. has named him a top 50 leadership and management expert, and the course is the foundation of Berkeley’s campus‑wide Berkeley Changemaker® initiative launched in 2020.
Formerly a travel writer, Budak now teaches the course across three UC Berkeley schools, helping students cultivate courage and character.
“I’m grateful for every single one of my students, past, present, and future; they remind me every day that change is possible. I’m so grateful for the privilege of helping them become the changemakers our world needs,” he says.
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