The Wharton Global Alumni Forum
San Francisco - June 23-24, 2011

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Leonard Lodish

Samuel R. Harrell Professor; Professor of Marketing;Vice Dean, Program for Social Impact; Leader and Co-founder, Global Consulting Practicum

Leonard M. Lodish (Ph.D. MIT, AB, Kenyon College) is the Samuel R. Harrell Professor in the Marketing Department of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton’s Vice Dean for the Program for Social Impact, and Leader of the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP) that has subsidiary partnerships with leading business schools in Israel, Chile, Peru, China, Taiwan, India, and Spain. Through the GCP program, groups of Wharton MBA's work with MBA students at the partner institution on real projects to help a foreign client company leverage a relationship with North America. Len was the initial Vice Dean for Wharton’s San Francisco campus from 2001-2009 and is currently Senior Advisor in San Francisco.


In 1995, he initiated, developed, and currently teaches Wharton’s Entrepreneurial Marketing MBA Course and wrote Entrepreneurial Marketing: Lessons from Wharton’s Pioneering MBA Course, with Howard L. Morgan, and Amy Kallianpur, published in 2001 by John Wiley. In 2007 Wharton Publishing published Marketing that Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company, written by Len, Howard Morgan, and Shellye Archambeau. He has published over 50 articles, and is active as an editor in leading Marketing and Management Science Journals.

Professor Lodish's primary research and consulting areas are in entrepreneurial marketing, strategic and tactical marketing resource planning, marketing decision support systems, and applications in firm/marketing strategy, sales force, advertising, and promotion planning. In 1987 he led a team that won the Franz Edelman Award for Management Science Practical Achievement from the Institute of Management Sciences for a sales force sizing and deployment model responsible for a sales increase of $25 million annually at Syntex Laboratories.

Professor Lodish has developed models and decision support systems that have been syndicated to worldwide use. They include MEDIAC® for media planning, CALLPLAN® for sales force deployment, and PROMOTER® and PROMOTIONSCAN® for promotion planning and evaluation. He led a comprehensive analysis of 381 real world split cable TV experiments entitled "How T.V. Advertising Works" which appeared as the lead article in Journal of Marketing Research in August 1995 and in 1996 won the American Marketing Association’s Paul E. Green award for the article in the journal which is most likely to have an impact on marketing practice. In 2000 this article was also awarded the Odell award for the article in the journal that had the most impact after five years and was also judged the best article after five years by the American Marketing Association’s Advertising Special Interest Group. An update to the study published in 2007 won the best article award from the editors of Journal of Advertising Research.

As a part time entrepreneur, Professor Lodish co-founded Management Decision Systems, Inc. (MDS) in 1967 with $4000 of initial equity capital. In 1985 MDS's, 300 employees, merged with Information Resources, Inc. to become a premier international decision support and marketing data supplier.

He is a Corporate Director of J&J Snack Foods, Inc (NASDAQ) and also is a director or advisory board member of private companies – DVtel, Diapers.com, and First Flavor, as well as an advisor to the Jerusalem Global Venture Funds and First Round Capital. Len was the first outside director of Diapers.com which has become the fastest growing Internet retailer for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Professor Lodish has consulted with many major firms world wide.

In 1996 Len and his wife Susan pedaled their tandem bicycle across the U.S., and since then have done long distance bicycle rides each year which have raised over $1,000,000 for the A.L.S. ( Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Association . Len is a licensed sailplane pilot and ardent bicycle commuter.