Sean’s career has included roles as a marketing practitioner, consultant, and academic. His consulting clients have included HP, Bell Canada, Telstra (Australia’s largest telecom), and others. He finds great joy in working with students at Northeastern University where he primarily chooses to teach Introduction to Marketing.

Education

  • MBA, Babson College
  • BA Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Selected Publications

Gallagher, Sean, Christopher Brown, and Linden Brown. “A strong market culture drives organizational performance and success.” Employment Relations Today 35.1 (2008): 25-31.

Brown, Linden, Sean M. Gallagher, and Christopher Brown. “How CEOs can promote a strong market culture.” Strategy & Leadership (2008).

Gallagher, Sean M. “Leadership Development Has Failed. But There's a Better Model.” Chief Learning Officer Magazine April 6, 2017. https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2017/04/06/leadership-development-failed-theres-better-model/

Research & Teaching Interests

The fact that talented, well-meaning people can perform poorly in one environment and suddenly boost their effectiveness when they move to another environment has fascinated Gallagher since early in his career. This interest drove him to explore the academic literature on organizational culture and, later, into the determinants of team effectiveness.

“Market orientation” has been an academic topic since the mid-1980s. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) defined market orientation as “the organization-wide generation of market intelligence, dissemination of the intelligence across departments and organization-wide responsiveness to it”

In collaboration with Linden Brown, PhD., and Christopher Brown, Gallagher helped to extend the research on market orientation and to make it more accessible to businesspeople across the globe. Their contribution was to statistically demonstrate the impact of organizational characteristics like cross-functional collaboration and strategic alignment on outcomes like customer satisfaction, innovation, new product success, and profitability.