---
id: "pisquared:interview/nickerson-jackson"
type: "Pi-Squared interview"
title: "Anita McGahan in conversation with Jackson Nickerson"
url: "https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/nickerson-jackson"
date: "2026-10-08"
people: ["Anita McGahan","Jackson Nickerson"]
summary: "Jackson Nickerson is the Edward Jones Dean of Saint Louis University's Chaifetz School of Business. In this role, he provides strategic direction and..."
recording: "https://vimeo.com/1234165162"
source: "Pi-Squared (pisquared.theburnescenter.org), The Burnes Center for Social Change"
licence: "none stated"
---

# Anita McGahan in conversation with Jackson Nickerson

Jackson Nickerson, Edward Jones Dean, St. Louis University's Chaifetz School of Business · 8 October 2026

## About the guest

Jackson Nickerson is the Edward Jones Dean of Saint Louis University's Chaifetz School of Business. In this role, he provides strategic direction and leadership for the school’s faculty, staff and students in 24 academic programs and four centers of distinction. Before joining the Chaifetz School, Jackson was the emeritus Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, where he spent more than 25 years. He holds a PhD from Berkeley, and he has been engaged with practitioners in various ways over his career, including while at Berkeley and through his work at the Brookings Institute. Jackson’s research is on leadership, organization and strategy, with an emphasis on innovation. He is particularly known for the “problem-solving perspective” and the knowledge-based view on the corporation. He has published six books, more than 85 journal articles and case studies, and numerous popular press articles and book chapters.

## Reflections from the interview

Jackson reflects on the transition that he had to make when he left his job at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to become a doctoral student at Berkeley. The shift from a systems perspective to a social-sciences mindset required rewiring his approach to analysis to focus on mechanisms through which important things are accomplished in organizations. After writing a series of field-spanning papers -- first linking transaction-cost economics with population ecology, and then linking the knowledge-based perspective with transaction-cost thinking -- he turned toward a managerially grounded shift in unit analysis. In this talk, Jackson reflects on and defines how he synthesized the knowledge-based perspective with a problem-oriented view on the challenges facing managers. This led him directly into thinking about how those problems are framed and conceptualized throughout organizations. Now as Dean of the St. Louis University's Chaifetz School of Business, Jackson is supporting students, educators and staff in fulfilling their promise as fully rounded and fully developed humanistic individuals with the capacity to bring compassion and insight to problem solving.

## Related resources

- [Dean’s page at St Louis University](https://www.slu.edu/business/about/leadership.php)
- [Jackson on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QPQqD3AAAAAJ&hl=en)
- [Jackson on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Nickerson)
- [Jackson’s paper with Todd Zenger on the knowledge-based view and problem-solving](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.1040.0093)
- [Jackson’s paper with Michael Holmes on the current crisis](https://www.emerald.com/smr/article-abstract/7/2/93/1369280/Crisis-of-jealousy-and-despair-a-theory-of-rising?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

## Recording

Video: https://vimeo.com/1234165162

## Category

[Where Do We Go From Here?](https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/category/where-next)

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Original page: https://pisquared.theburnescenter.org/interviews/nickerson-jackson · Licence: none stated