Bradley R Staats

Dr. Bradley R. Staats is a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School and author of "Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive". He also leads UNC’s Business of Health Care Initiative, a broad interdisciplinary effort to address critical health care challenges. As a respected change management keynote speaker, he collaborates with organizations globally to refine their learning and analytics strategies, helping them stay competitive and innovative through continuous improvement.

Staats's academic and professional work merges operations management with behavioral science to explore how learning and operational improvement can be optimized within organizations. His research emphasizes overcoming learning barriers, minimizing the impact of biases to enhance success, and employing data analytics effectively to ask the right questions and maximize value. He conducts field-based research in diverse sectors including health care, software services, and retail, combining this with archival data and field experiments to bolster both theoretical and practical applications in his field.

Staats is recognized for his contributions to academia and practice with several accolades. He has received the Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Accomplishments Award from the Production and Operations Management Society, the Poets & Quants award as one of the top 40 under-40 business-school professors globally, and the Warren Bennis Prize for the best article in Harvard Business Review on leadership. His insights and research have been widely published and featured in numerous academic journals and media outlets. Staats holds a Doctorate of Business Administration from Harvard Business School, where he also earned his MBA. He holds a BS in electrical engineering and a BA in Plan II and Spanish from The University of Texas at Austin, having been named the Most Outstanding Male Graduate of his class. Prior to academia, he gained significant experience in venture capitalism, investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and strategic planning at Dell Corporation.