Executive leadership for scholarly organizations.

Governance, finances, board support, membership, and the conference operations that come with them. UpScholar has held that function for international scholarly societies since 2010, and builds ProgramChair, the software those conferences run on.

Model

A standing executive function, not a rotating volunteer post or an agency retainer.

Experience

Two international societies, led concurrently since 2010 and 2017.

Grounding

Doctorate in Organizational Behavior. Leadership, artificial intelligence, and self-concept.

Who

An executive, not an agency.

Most scholarly societies run on borrowed time. The work falls to faculty who already have full appointments, and it changes hands every year or two just as someone gets good at it. What gets lost is not effort, it is continuity: the vendor relationships, the institutional memory, the decisions made three boards ago and the reasons behind them.

That gap is what UpScholar fills. I hold the role rather than advising the person who holds it, which is a different arrangement from a consultancy working to a brief. The software follows from the same place. ProgramChair exists because I needed it to run the conferences I am accountable for, and the societies alongside mine turned out to need it too. BWOX exists because I also teach, and the exercises that actually work tend never to leave the room they were built for.

Dr. Brandon Charpied

Executive Director, Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, since 2010
Executive Director, International Association for Conflict Management, since 2017
Creator and owner, ProgramChair.io
Creator and owner, BWOX.com

The register

Two relationships, kept separate.

The societies are led, not owned. They are independent organizations with their own boards, and UpScholar holds the executive directorship of each. The second list is the opposite: the practice itself, and the software built out of the work, owned and operated outright.

Organizations Directs

MOBTS

Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society

An international society for management educators, founded in 1974 and centred on the craft of teaching across the management disciplines. Annual conferences in the United States and abroad, plus regional meetings.

Executive Director
since 2010

IACM

International Association for Conflict Management

A scholarly society founded to advance the study and practice of negotiation and conflict management, spanning interpersonal, organizational, societal, and international settings. Members come from management, psychology, law, and political science.

Executive Director
since 2017

Properties Owns

UpScholar

Executive management and conference operations

The executive practice itself, held under contract. Day to day administration, board and committee support, budgets and audits, membership systems, elections and awards, and full conference operations from site selection through proceedings.

Owner and principal Active

ProgramChair.io

Conference management for scholarly societies

Submission, peer review, decisions, program building, and proceedings in one system. Written to replace the software its author had spent his career working around.

Creator and owner In use

BWOX.com

Experiential exercises for the classroom

A repository of teaching exercises published with the facilitator guide, student materials, timing, and debrief, rather than a paper describing them. Opens in management and organizational behavior, then negotiation, conflict and mediation, and economics.

Creator and owner In development