tEMitope stephen oLADIMEJi

Hello!

I am an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research explores how organizations grow and adapt, focusing on the intersection of time, decisions, and human capital in strategy and entrepreneurship. Within this broad agenda, I pursue two interrelated themes: (1) strategic evolution—how firms navigate complexity and time—and (2) organizational imprints—how internal people decisions shape trajectories of growth.

My work has been recognized with several awards. In 2025, I received the Best Conceptual Paper Award from the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management for a single-authored paper on hiring patterns in new ventures. In 2022, my coauthored research with Andrew Henderson and Melissa Graebner on the increasing difficulty of finding newer firms among elite companies was honored with the Glueck Best Paper Award from the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management. In 2021, my paper with David Harrison on CEO hubris and overconfidence was nominated for Best Paper Awards by both the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management and the International Corporate Governance Society. In addition, I received the Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Strategic Management Division of the Academy of Management in 2022.

I hold PhD, MS, and MBA degrees from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, and a BSc in Economics from Obafemi Awolowo University. Before my graduate studies, I worked in securities at Goldman Sachs (London, United Kingdom) as an intern, and in real estate and equity research at ARM (Lagos, Nigeria).

You can reach me at toladimeji@umass.edu or connect with me on LinkedIn.