Faculty Spotlight – Dr. Susan Luck

Meet Dr. Susan Luck, Pfeiffer's Program Director of the Graduate Business School and Professor of Business Administration. Dr. Luck has been teaching for over 30 years; 28 years at Pfeiffer. She teaches a variety of MBA courses, such as Organizational Communications, Business Agility, and Strategic Management. She also teaches MSOC courses, including Crisis Management, Negotiations and Conflict Resolution. During the summer, she teaches Business Communications for the undergraduate school.

When asked how she became interested in her field, Dr. Luck said, "I've always been a writer; I started earning money for my writing when I was 16 and earned enough through my writing to pay for college. After college, I became a television writer, then worked in corporate for television, mostly handling complaints and communication issues with the public. I began teaching at night during this time to help pay the bills. Many things soured me on television, most notably that even back then the rule was something had to be only 85% true to run. So, when I was offered a job teaching full time I took it, thinking I would stay six months while I looked for another job. Teaching stayed my full-time job and working as a communications consultant and trainer became a lucrative side gig."

When it comes to her classes, Dr. Luck would like for her students to walk away with heightened critical thinking, stronger writing skills, and the ability to apply the course concepts to their professional lives.

Dr. Luck has won the Provost Award for Teaching and has had the Project Management Institute name her book Zen and the Art of Business Communication as a must-read that can teach even the veteran communicator a trick or two.

When asked about what she has done in her field recently, Dr. Luck said, "Last fall I presented research that Dr. Stephanie Swartz of the University of Mainz Applied Sciences and I did in AI, which involved my International Business course, to both the International Conference for the Association for Business Communication and ADEIL (the Association for Distance Education and Independent Learning). Right now I'm doing research with two colleagues from other universities on use of endearments in the workplace, which are mainly cultural expressions, and whether use of these allow others to discriminate against those who use them."