Chris Myers named inaugural Peetz Family Professor of Leadership

Karen Peetz knows a thing or two about leadership.  

During her long and impressive career, she rose to become president of Bank of New York Mellon and chief administrative officer at Citi, shepherding those storied institutions through challenges large and small. On the boards of Penn State and Wells Fargo, she provided deft direction through intense scandal-fueled firestorms. 

So when she saw Christopher Myers of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School guiding participants at a Center for Innovative Leadership seminar a few months ago, she recognized a person and a concept that she wanted to support. 

“Part of why I was interested in CIL is that I could have used those leadership courses myself,” she said.

On Monday, that support became official when Myers, CIL’s founding faculty director, became the inaugural Peetz Family Professor of Leadership. 

Speaking at the installation event, Peetz said Myers had led a terrifyingly realistic simulation, seeking actionable leadership advice for a company responding to news that its device, used in pediatric heart surgeries, was defective. “You can imagine I was in a cold sweat that weekend,” she said. 

“I witnessed Chris in action — teaching, guiding, facilitating and synthesizing. The teams worked over the weekend to develop their action plans, then sell their plans to a mock board of directors and even conduct a mock press conference.” 

Also speaking at the event were Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels, Carey Business School Dean Alex Triantis, and Professor Emeritus Kathleen Sutcliffe. Myers’s parents, wife, and children also attended. 

“We couldn’t ask for a better pairing than Karen and Chris,” said Daniels, who described Peetz as a “consummate connector” who “never fails to give precisely the incisive advice and counsel to see your way through a difficult moment in a way that’s true to the values and traditions of the university.” 

Peetz described Myers as “the ideal academician," a brilliant scholar with infectious enthusiasm.  “He has an incredibly sharp mind and just a very nice way about him,” she said.

Myers, part of Carey’s faculty since 2016, founded CIL in November 2021 as the school’s first research center, focused on the idea of “present-moment leadership” that continually adapts to changing circumstances – a strategy that seems more relevant all the time as information moves at the speed of a keyboard click.  

Much of his research looks at leadership challenges and opportunities in health care, particularly how people learn vicariously and share knowledge. He has published extensively in prestigious business and scientific journals, including the Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Applied Psychology.  

Myers went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an undergraduate, where he took an organizational behavior class taught by Adam Grant, the now-famous author and podcaster.  He was inspired to follow in Grant’s footsteps and earn his PhD at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. 

That’s when he began working with Sutcliffe, who would later move to Johns Hopkins and become a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments at Carey, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Armstrong Institute, and the schools of medicine and nursing.  

“Everything we predicted about Chris becoming a star scholar has come true, and then some,” said Sutcliffe, who has known him for 15 years and was his dissertation chair. 

“What I didn’t realize and fully anticipate is how much I would grow and develop and learn in the process. Chris is one of the most generous scholars I know. He mentors students to make them better human beings as well as stronger scholars.”

Myers became assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, then joined the Carey Business School as assistant professor of Management and Organization. He is now a full professor, with joint faculty appointments in the schools of medicine and public health.  

 “Coming to Hopkins was a breath of fresh air,” he said. “This is an environment where faculty — even pre-tenure junior faculty — can have a voice and help shape the direction of this exciting school at America’s first research university.” 

In 2018, he helped create the Office of Executive Education, which offers customized professional development for organizations. 

“At Carey, I’ve had the opportunity to do things I couldn’t have dreamt elsewhere,” he said. “To do truly interdisciplinary research that not only advances management science, but that also bridges our understanding of organizations in health care; to publish that work in a broad range of outlets including leading management and medical journals; to help stand up and shape the school’s Office of Executive Education, and to launch its first homegrown academic center – the Center for Innovative Leadership.”