Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair and a professor in the Organizations, Strategy and International Management Area, was elected as president of Asia Academy of Management (AAOM). He assumed the role June 25 during AAOM’s conference in Miri, Malaysia; and will serve a three-year term (2024-2026).
Peng said that AAOM is generally viewed as the number one academic association of management that is in Asia, on Asia, and of Asia. He has been a member since its founding in 1998, when he was a very junior scholar. He has served as editor-in-chief of its official journal Asia Pacific Journal of Management (APJM). He has contributed in a number of leadership capacities, including as vice president during the 2022-2024 period.
“I can say that I have grown with AAOM personally and professionally,” he said. “Now as a senior scholar, I appreciate the vote of confidence from our members. This enables me to return back to this academic association, which has fostered my growth professionally.”
Immediate goals include finding the location and host school for the 2028 conference. At the AAOM conference in Malaysia, the location for the 2026 conference was announced — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
“One major initiative I’d like to launch will be some activities during the ‘off year,’ during which AAOM will not have its main conference, such as 2025, 2027, and 2029,” he said. “These activities can take a variety of flexible formats, such as small conferences, panels, and professional development workshops. The goals are to make AAOM more nimble, more relevant, and more valuable to our members and stakeholders.”
Peng said his leadership will be hands-on.
“As a smaller academic association — say, in comparison with the Academy of Management — AAOM features a flat structure, which will enable me to get to know more members and work with them,” he said.
The University of Texas at Dallas, Peng said, has already become a “household” name among management scholars throughout Asia.
“This is mostly because of our UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™, which in a very high-profile way signals that we are very serious about research,” he said. “I am not the only JSOM faculty member involved with AAOM. My colleague, Riki Takeuchi, is a representative at large. In the past, Seung-Hyun Lee and Eric Tsang served as senior editors for APJM. Overall, there is tremendous respect for the work we do at JSOM. My election as president of AAOM can help solidify this reputation.”
Jindal School faculty members and students will likely benefit from his visibility as AAOM president, Peng said, because of the better networking and professional development opportunities that he can help bring.
“Asia is a source of many of our students, a job marketplace for many graduates, and a site for a lot of our research projects undertaken by faculty,” he said.
When asked what trends or challenges he sees currently shaping the field of management in Asia and globally, Peng said that forces such as deglobalization, geopolitics, supply chain optimization, and artificial intelligence are necessitating numerous changes in Asia and globally.
“Many books need to be rewritten,” he said. “These would include my own textbooks Global Business and Global Strategy. For example, international market entry used to be a hot research topic. Now, international market exit needs to be studied a lot more.”
Peng said the AAOM can contribute to addressing these challenges by encouraging scholars to embark on research dealing with these “hot” topics, and to nurture other scholars who are more interested in working on more basic, more enduring phenomena.
“There is always this tension in management research,” he said. “As a professional school, we must prove our relevance. At the same time, we cannot always chase fads. We need to maintain our scholarly core, which needs to focus on the more fundamental questions of the field — for example, what determines the success and failure of firms around the world? At AAOM, we constantly endeavor to strike the right balance.”
Peng said he balances his roles and responsibilities at JSOM with his new role as president of AAOM by focusing on high-impact, high-visibility external service.
“My roles and responsibilities at JSOM are in three areas: research, teaching, and service,” he said. “My new role as president of AAOM is in the area of service. This is something I have always been doing and, if I may, excelling. My new role at AAOM will enable me to make stronger contributions in service, which has always been appreciated by JSOM and UTD as well as the wider external community.”
