Dr. J. Gerald Suarez is a premier educator, speaker and consultant in the fields of Organizational Design, Systems Thinking and Total Quality Management. Suarez joined Smith in 2005 as Executive Director of the multidisciplinary Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) Honors Fellows program. He was a Ralph J. Tyser Teaching Fellow and an Executive Education Senior Fellow. From 2008 to 2010 he served as Associate Dean of External Strategy, leading the offices of marketing communications, recruitment and career services.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – The five-day, 40-hour workweek has been the conventional practice in business essentially since its inception by Henry Ford in 1926. But recently, a Microsoft pilot program challenged that convention.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Work can become a bit mundane, even for people who truly love what they do. It often happens when we’re mid-career; things become so predictable and unexciting that we start to operate on autopilot.
SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Stoked by social media, our all-too-common fear of missing out, or FOMO, is often cited as a reason why we live beyond our means, take on debt and generally feel unsatisfied at home and in our careers. It’s why we put so much pressure on ourselves to have Instagram-worthy lives, 24 hours a day.
This past winter-term, 20 students had the opportunity to learn about design and innovation in the Spanish context. While in Spain, students had a full itinerary of company visits, workshops, and cultural activities. In Barcelona, they visited the iconic La Sagrada Familia, took a guided tour of the gothic quarter, and even had the opportunity to meet with local business students. In the capital city of Madrid, students took time to reflect in Retiro Park and enjoyed traditional Spanish tapas. Led by QUEST Honors faculty Dr. Gerald Suarez and Dr. Pamela Armstrong the program focused on introducing students to design concepts from the perspective of companies in various industries. Company visits included Design Thinkers Group, TransfoLAB, and Metropoli Ecosystems.
Poets & Quants for Undergraduates is associating the adage “great teachers are change agents and difference-makers” with student-mentoring by Sandra Loughlin and J. Gerald Suarez at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Americans are known to be good at many things. Vacationing isn't one of them. Year after year, workplace surveys reveal that millions of American workers failed to take their allotted vacation days. And increasingly, the overriding reason is fear. In 2016, 54 percent of Americans ended the year with unused vacation days, according to a survey from the U.S. Travel Association's Project Time Off. The Smith School's J. Gerald Suarez explains why the short-term benefits that might come from being in the office all year long could come at the expense of long-term failures. Are we hurting our careers by not occasionally taking breaks from it? Read more...
The global proportion of women among the planet's billionaires is still shy of 3 percent. That's a slim minority, but the proportion has tripled in the past decade. And as Forbes recently documented, 56 of these women are self-made billionaires. While the percentage remains small, the growth hints at a certain "golden era for female entrepreneurs," Smith School professor J. Gerald Suarez says. Read more...
If you reflexively check your work email before you’re even out of bed in the morning, and just before you close your eyes to sleep, and at nonstop intervals in between, this story is for you. In France, workers are being given the “right to disconnect” outside of working hours, thanks to a new law that went into effect on January 1. The French government has said that the intervention was a necessary step to protect the health and wellbeing of the country’s workers. Experts from the Smith School say the move makes sense. Read more...
How well could your organization handle a surprise vacancy in the C-suite? Perhaps not very well at all. A recent global survey from the ManpowerGroup found that 87 percent of organizations "have not identified future leaders to fill critical roles." Why? It's partly because Millennials largely are not interested in working in conventional management structures, says the multinational HR consulting firm. But Smith School professor J. Gerald Suarez suggests the situation is not so critical. Read more...
