SHE GREW UP IN ACADEMIA
The University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul was like a second home for Alison Davis and her siblings, Jennifer, Clark and Flint. Their father, Gordon Davis, spent more than 45 years teaching and conducting research at the Carlson School of Management. He is widely noted for pioneering the academic study of management information systems. Alison’s mother, LaNay (Flint) Davis, attended UMinn for master’s and doctoral degrees. A licensed psychologist, she built a busy practice around her specialties of marriage and family therapy.
HER PASSPORT IS WELL-STAMPED
Living in Belgium for a year with her family turned Alison, then 12, into a traveler for life. The lessons — welcome new experiences, adapt as needed, treasure far-flung friendships — took special hold in later years as she and her husband, Michael, raised two sons, Kent and Gordon. The family’s first of many international trips was to Vienna and London, in 2005, where a tradition was born: climbing to the top of a local landmark (in this case, St. Paul’s Cathedral) and sharing a wide-angle view of new surroundings.
HER ROLE MODELS CROSS SECTORS
At age 27, teaching at Carnegie Mellon in the male-dominated field of industrial administration, Davis-Blake looked to Margaret Thatcher. Gender was no barrier for Britain’s longest serving prime minister. Reading about Abraham Lincoln illuminated a critical element of leadership: rallying very different people around common goals for the greater good. Role model Herb Kelleher co-founded Southwest Airlines, a high-performing company that values individuality and treats people well. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities and former president of the University of Michigan, became an inspiration, mentor and friend during their years working together at Michigan.
SHE KNOWS ORGANIZATIONS
Davis-Blake’s scholarship delves into organizational behavior, most recently examining the impact of outsourcing and temporary employees. What happens when firms outsource complex tasks like developing intellectual property? Can full-time, part-time, flex-time and contract workers collaborate to good effect? The questions that fuel her research are relevant to companies of all kinds. One personal takeaway: Successful leaders don’t leave workplace culture to chance. They create pathways so people in different roles can do their best work together. Davis-Blake believes in Positive Business Leadership, which generates economic value by creating a great place to work and being a good neighbor to the community, nation and world.
HER FAMILY IS CENTRAL
Alison Davis and Michael Blake met in the early 1980s, at Stanford, as she pursued a PhD and he, postdoctoral studies. Their work in very different disciplines — respectively, organizational behavior and astrophysics — places common emphasis on academic theory that influences real-world practice. Married 35 years in 2018, they have also bonded around art, music, theater and travel. Their son Kent, 26, is a software engineer in Silicon Valley; 22-year-old Gordon is a senior studying computer science at Stanford.