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Kenan Institute 2024 Grand Challenge: Business Resilience
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Market-Based Solutions to Vital Economic Issues

Ronald Williams

Professor of the Practice in the Strategy and Entrepreneurship Department, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

Ron is currently a Professor of the Practice in the Strategy and Entrepreneurship Department at the Kenan-Flagler Business School – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – where he has taught in the MBA and Executive MBAs programs with a focus on Value Generation, Strategic Innovation, and IT. Ron has also been an instructor in a number of company specific Kenan-Flagler Executive Education Programs including ones for Cisco Systems, Duke Energy, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and U.S. Air Force. While at UNC he consulted with the Department of Defense in the area of joint logistics and has led a number of executive workshops centered on a customer-led view of strategy and organization for companies facing volatile and uncertain disturbances across the business landscape.

He joined the university in 2002 after retiring from IBM where he held various management positions in sales, marketing, and consulting. Ron obtained his MBA from Indiana University.

For the last fifteen years at IBM Ron’s roles were in the introduction of new technologies into the sales organization with associated sales strategies focused on their business value. His management responsibilities explicitly required him to help customers in their business transformation via IT and to transform the IBM-customer dialog. In all instances, he also did this during a period when the technology itself was changing rapidly and radically (client/server, TCP/IP, e-business) so that his work required development of entirely new frameworks drawing on the best of thinking and practice inside and outside IBM.

Ron is also the co-author of The Value Path: Embedding Innovation in Everyday Business When the Customer Make the Rules.