Executive Education
Faculty

Dr. Peer C. Fiss is the Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair in Business Administration, Professor of Management and Organization, Professor of Sociology (by courtesy), and Associate Vice Dean of Research at USC Marshall School of Business. He teaches courses on competitive and corporate strategy, with a particular focus on how organizations navigate disruption, make strategic choices under uncertainty, and thrive amid complexity.

Widely recognized as a master teacher, Professor Fiss is known for making cases and concepts come alive in the classroom. He is a recipient of USC Marshall’s Golden Apple Teaching Award, the Mellon Mentoring Award, and the Evan C. Thompson Award for Mentoring and Leadership, and he consistently receives outstanding course evaluations. He previously served as Chair of the Management & Organization Department and regularly teaches in custom executive education programs for Fortune 500 companies, including First American Financial, where he helps senior leaders develop practical frameworks for strategic thinking, competitive positioning, and organizational alignment.

Professor Fiss’s research examines strategic framing, categorization, and causal complexity in organizations and markets. His work has been published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. He is the coauthor (with Charles Ragin) of Intersectional Inequality: Race, Class, Test Scores, and Poverty (University of Chicago Press), which applies set-analytic methods to complex policy challenges. He earned his PhD in Management & Organizations and Sociology from Northwestern University.