— My story
Meet the Authors
Patrick S. Noonan is Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Information Systems & Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Noonan joined Emory in 1993 from the faculty of the Harvard Business School, where he had earned his PhD in Decision Sciences. He also holds a BS in Engineering & Applied Science and an MBA, both from Yale University.
He served as Goizueta’s first Associate Dean for Management Practice Initiatives from 2012-2015, and as Assistant Dean and Director of MBA Programs from 1996-2000. He also has been Visiting Professor at Duke’s Fuqua School for many years, and he has taught short courses at Aalto University (Helsinki), Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá), ESAN (Lima), and Universidad ORT (Montevideo, Uruguay), and Duke-Kunshan University (Kunshan, China).
Dr. Noonan’s academic field is “decision analysis,” which draws on both the wisdom and the analytical methodologies of economics, psychology, statistics, sociology and engineering to provide prescriptions for improving decision making in business, in the professions, in health sciences, in politics and in life.
His analytics coursework – which has included decision modeling, game theory and data analysis – earned Goizueta’s Distinguished Educator award 13 times and “Last Lecture” speaker role six times. In 2001 he received their Adler Prize for Teaching Excellence. He has been honored by inclusion in Emory’s “Great Teacher Lecture Series” and earned Goizueta’s Keough Award for Excellence. In 2005 he was awarded a Fulbright grant to serve as a Senior Specialist to Universidad ORT. In 2019 his professional society, INFORMS, awarded him their Annual Prize for Teaching the Practice of Analytics, in recognition of his career impact, both in and out of the classroom.
His research and teaching in the area of managerial decision making combines his academic training with his real-world experience as a management consultant. He learned the profession at McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, and later as a Director at Planning Technologies Group (which he co-founded in 1990 and sold to Knowledge Universe in 1998). For many years he has offered workshops in decision making and the “craft skills” of consulting and problem solving. Over the years, his consulting and executive education clients have included such diverse organizations as Microsoft, Bertelsmann, News Corp, New York Daily News, Occidental Petroleum, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merrill Lynch, the CDC, Dow Chemical, Sandia National Laboratories, INFORMS, Alcon, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Sea-Land, Central Bank of Nigeria, Cox Communications, Accenture, Johns Hopkins and Greenpeace.
Dr. Noonan also is an expert on teaching & learning, especially in the business school context, and is a frequent facilitator of workshops for B-school and engineering faculty in the techniques of case teaching and other active learning techniques.
Lynne G. Segall is the Associate Dean of Management Practice Initiatives and an Associate Professor in the Practice of Organization & Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. She also serves as Faculty Advisor to the John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case Competition.
In her primary role, Professor Segall leads Goizueta IMPACT, the school’s flagship project-based experiential learning curriculum, which is a core part of the Goizueta MBA experience. It is designed to provide students with both classroom and field experiences to learn and apply practical frameworks and systematic processes to address complex, real-world problems and facilitate effective action. In this role, she leads the overall strategic direction for Goizueta’s project-based experiential learning programs including developing and teaching core courses, cultivating client relationships with the business community, and leading a team of Goizueta IMPACT core and elective faculty to ensure meaningful student and client experiences.
Prof. Segall joined Goizueta in July 2015 after almost 16 years at Accenture. In addition to client service, her tenure at Accenture included roles designing, building and running the global Strategy and Management Consulting capability / professional development programs for 16,000 management consultants. She also developed and executed the talent strategy for Accenture’s management consulting practice, creating, advancing and implementing market-relevant offerings in the areas of leadership, talent, HR and organization change. In addition, she has taught (and provided coaching on) structured problem-solving and communication to full-time MBA student teams at Goizueta Business School since 2002.
In addition to teaching in all of Emory’s MBA-degree programs, Prof. Segall also helps organizations build problem-solving and communication capabilities, with clients including UPS, the US Army Rangers, Lowe’s, Georgia Power, Delta Air Lines, Fujitsu, Lucent Technologies, Warner Media, OneDigital, TD Bank, BTS Consulting, Crumbl, Insight Sourcing Group, Midtown Consulting Group, and Roark Capital.
Prof. Segall holds an MBA from Emory University, where she was a Woodruff Scholar, graduated Beta Gamma Sigma, and received the John Robson Outstanding Student Service Award, the highest service honor awarded by the school to students. Prior to business school, she spent seven years in the property casualty insurance industry working across multiple functions – marketing, underwriting, accounting and claims. She has served on non-profit boards in Atlanta, including her current role on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for Horizon Theatre, a professional theater. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Communication Studies from Northwestern University.