Brooke Vuckovic
Clinical Professor of Management & Organizations
Brooke Olson Vuckovic is a Clinical Professor of Leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, where she teaches on a wide variety of leadership topics including the Moral Complexity in Leadership. Brooke received Kellogg's most prestigious teaching award, the L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year, in 2021. She has also received the Faculty Impact Award multiple times for her outstanding contributions in the classroom.
Brooke’s teaching is shaped by her multi-disciplinary background. She received her PhD from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, where she also taught at the Booth School of Business in Business Communications. Her early research examined how religious leaders used stories to define who they are and what they value. She returns to this theme again and again in teaching and in her work with executives, as powerful storytelling fuels powerful leadership. Brooke recently authored a case study series (“Moral Complexity in Leadership”), which draws on literature to explore moral dilemmas that leaders face.
Brooke’s work at Kellogg reflects her deep interest in the complex tasks of leadership broadly speaking, but especially within multi-generational family enterprise and founder-led companies. In addition to her teaching, Brooke was the Academic Director for “Leading the Family Enterprise,” and the faculty director of coaching for Zell Fellows, Kellogg’s highly selective venture accelerator program.
Outside of Kellogg, Brooke has provided highly-personalized support to C-Suite executives as an executive coach for nearly two decades. Her work focuses on helping executives define their purpose and presence as leaders, stretching them to become more focused, non-reactive and clear on who they are, why they lead, and what the circumstances they face demand of them.
Brooke has lived in the Chicago area since she relocated from her hometown of Austin, Texas to attend graduate school. She has found a second home here with her husband, three daughters, and their hairless cat. Brooke is a voracious reader, confirmed camper, earnest cook, sporadic theater-goer and aspiring hiker.
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PhD, 2002, University of Chicago
MA, 1994, University of Chicago
BA, 1992, University of Texas at Austin -
L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award (2021)
Nominated for the L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award (2019, 2020)
Kellogg Nota Bene Speaker for MBA Programs (2020)
Faculty Impact Award for MBA Teaching (2020)
Faculty Impact Award for MBA Teaching (2019)
Faculty Impact Award for MBA Teaching (2018)
Faculty Impact Award for MBA Teaching (2016)
Enterprise Leadership Program
Leadership at the enterprise level means rising to the challenge. No longer is your growth linear — it’s exponential. The focus moves past the single team or unit to the enterprise as a whole, beyond functional skills to strategic decisions based on a broader perspective. Kellogg Executive Education’s Enterprise Leadership Program prepares you to lead at height and scale and helps you develop an anticipatory mindset.
Leading for Impact within Family Enterprise
As an aspiring leader within family enterprise, you’ll discover how to establish your credibility and authority in the business community, among family shareholders, with the board and management team. As an established leader, you’ll explore the complexities of mentoring the next generation and of managing succession and letting-go. For all, the program can enable you to better manage the nuanced paradoxes that are characteristic of family business leadership.
Strategic Capabilities for Emerging Business Leaders
This highly interactive, live virtual program positions the high-performing, emerging leader to make bold career moves, laying the foundation for general management and leadership of the broader business. Through an exploration of strategic business functions with some of Kellogg’s leading faculty, you will immerse yourself in how to lead in a complex, competitive, global market.
The Leader Within
If you're seeking to propel your organization and career forward faster, this dynamic program will take you on an intensive, comprehensive leadership journey designed to spur your individual growth and elevate your leadership capabilities.
Moral Complexity in Leadership: An Exploration through Literature (LDEV-460-5)
Moral Complexity in Leadership: An Exploration through Literature (LDEV-460-0)
In this course, literature serves as the entry point to analyze morally complex matters and then formulate and communicate cogent opinions about them in a group. Through literature, we will pull out common themes of classic moral quandaries that leaders face (e.g. pernicious issues such as greed or self-deceit, operating as an "agent of another" whom you disagree with, fractured professional and personal life, the troubles with "likability," etc). We will then examine how characters in the stories and real-world business leaders have grappled with such issues and analyze how individuals make choices congruent with their values, what actions convey care for the systems within which they operate (or are responsible for), and perhaps most importantly, what can get them off track. Students will not only read critically and carefully, but will also learn the arts of listening well, facilitating dialog amidst disagreement, and articulating sound arguments through weekly reflection papers and their conversations with one another. The course is built around weekly small group discussions in class and a plenary lecture on the week's themes in the business world. The emphasis is on deep, rigorous reflection and meaningful communication rather than sound bites or quick tips. The reading materials span centuries, continents and viewpoints, building respect for the complexity of those we interact with on a daily basis. This discussion-based course includes weekly homework assignments (reading and writing), a group project analyzing a film that conveys moral complexity, and a final, individual paper and brief presentation on a work of your choosing.
