Professor Nemeth led the international assignment for Executive MBA students from London Business School to South Africa for 3 years and has consulted for a number of companies on the broad issue of communication and culture. Those companies include: Ernst & Young, Metropolitan Insurance, Home Choice, Telkom SA, Allee Bleue Winery, Lesedi Nuclear Services, Woolworths, Waterford Winery, Vergelagen Winery and Cape Grace Hotel. Professor Nemeth’s specialty is the effectiveness of communication modes, both formal and informal, leading teams for innovation and the role of “voice” in corporate cultures of innovation.
Professor Nemeth has given invited addresses on teams, decision making, persuasion, corporate cultures and innovation to the Business Schools or Schools of Management at Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, MIT, Yale, UC Berkeley and at Aston Business School and London Business School as well as the School of Management in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2004-2005, she was named a Leverhulme Fellow, one of the most prestigious awards in social science in the United Kingdom. She served 6 years as the Chair of the Board of Advisors to the Institute of Management, Innovation and Organization at the Haas school of Business at UC Berkeley.
Professor Nemeth’s book “In defense of troublemakers: the power of dissent in life and business” summarizes her approach after decades of research on persuasion and influence, especially about the ways in which consensus and dissent stimulate different kinds of thinking about an issue. The resulting message regarding the value of dissent is applied to business, law and everyday life, including major historical and current examples in the news
Professor Nemeth has an extensive curriculum vitae with over 100 publications on these specialty areas. Some exemplars of her work in these areas are:
Nemeth, C. (1997). Managing innovation: When less is more. California Management Review, 40, 59-74.
Nemeth, C.J. (2012) Minority Influence Theory. In Van Lange, P.A.M. , Kruglanski, A.W. and Higgins. E. T. Handbook of Theories in Social Psychology. Vol 2. New York: Sage, pp. 362-378
Nemeth, C. J. and O’Connor, A. (2017 in press) Better than Individuals: The stimulating qualities of dissent for group creativity”. In P. Paulus and B. Nijstad (eds) Innovation through Collaboration. Oxford University Press, 2nd edition.