Hello everyone.  The Eastern Academy of Management (EAM) is a wonderful organization and I am happy to share some thoughts with you as its immediate past President. I enjoyed serving as the President of the EAM and it was an experience that I will always treasure.  

            I have a lot of appreciation for those would made last years conferences such a good one for EAM.  Thank you Dilip Mirchandani and team for your fantastic program, and Marguerite Schneider and team for an outstanding conference.  Thanks are also due to Joan Weiner, Kate Suchon and the two local hosts from Vrije Universiteit - Marcel Veenswijk and Alfons Van Marrewijk and their teams for an incredible EAM-I conference in Amsterdam. It was a truly remarkable experience.  I would like to acknowledge the hard work of several outgoing EAM Board members Eric Kessler, Kate Suchon, (Directors) Susan Baker (Secretary), Ted Peters (Treasurer) Noushi Rahman (Newsletter Editor) and Alvin Hwang (VP Membership).  

            Academy President Tom Lee was at New Brunswick for the entire duration of the 2007 conference and we thank him for his support of the EAM.  Our fundraising was at record levels last year and the New Brunswick conference made money for the EAM. I would like to thank all the Universities and corporate sponsors that made generous contributions. Special thanks to Marguerite for coordinating the fundraising effort and Joel Harmon for help with the corporate sponsorship.

            Laurel Goulet our program chair for the 2008 conference has an exciting theme – “The power of one, the power of many” for the Conference in Washington DC. I understand that we have had received a significant number of submissions for this conference!  Liz Davis and her team have been working hard on Local Arrangements. It is time to register for the conference and make your plans to attend.

            Submissions to the EAM conference have been rising steadily since the Providence Conference in 2004. We have been happy to note that doctoral students are submitting more of their of the quality research to this conference. Many doctoral students who have attended the EAM conference for the first time have been happy with their experience in terms of feedback they have received and the general collegiality of the EAM members that they have come back the next year. We had many practitioners attend the conference. They appreciated the numerous symposia and the paper presentations.  We have also had some international attendees and members from other regional academies participate in the conference because they found the conference theme appealing.

            I also want to highlight three major initiatives that the Eastern Academy of Management undertook this last year. First, EAM signed an agreement with Palgrave Macmillan to sponsor and market OMJ, EAM’s journal. This is a major step in increasing the visibility of the EAM and its journal. Their marketing efforts should increase overall subscription and readership of the journal. OMJ also has a new editor in Bill Ferris (Western New England College). Second, Eric Kessler (our previous past president) launched the first of the “White Paper Series” in the Organization Management Journal. The White Papers are written by prominent EAM scholars. In these papers, they present their research in a form that can be more readily used by practitioners. Summaries of the articles from the White paper Series were distributed at the EAM meetings in May 2007. Our final initiative was the electronic voting system. Thanks to Ed Christensen (current President) and Dave Fearon (VP at large), we were able to conduct our first electronic elections at the New Brunswick conference. It was very well received.  I hope those of you that attended the conference were able to participate. 

            Our second issue of the White Paper Series will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in May 2008. Overall, we had an exciting year last year and I hope all of you come to Washington DC for our upcoming conference in May 2008 and help keep the Eastern Academy of Management a vibrant family and an engaged academic community.