Rate My Professor Vinit Desai

Vinit Desai is a Professor of Management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, affiliated with both Management and Health Administration. He earned his PhD and MS in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin. Desai's research examines how organizations respond to and learn from failures of all kinds, from financial shortfalls and mistakes to accidents, across industries including healthcare, commercial aviation, natural gas transmission, and freight transportation. His academic interests encompass organizational learning, performance feedback, legitimacy, and reputation management.

Desai has published in top-tier journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Strategic Organization, Journal of Management Studies, and Journal of Management. Key works include "Not Quite Shipshape: How Better Reputations Can Lead to Worse Performance" (Journal of Management Studies, in press), "To See, or Not to Sea: Differing Performance Outcomes from Visible and Private Health Inspections in the U.S. Cruise Travel Industry" (Strategic Organization, 2025), "Change at Last, but When Does Change Last? Preserving Attentional Engagement around Past Failures and their Lessons" with Peter Madsen (Academy of Management Journal, 2024), "Take your time? How activity timing affects organizational learning and performance outcomes" (Organization Science, 2022), "Can Busy Organizations Learn to Get Better? Distinguishing Between the Competing Effects of Constrained Capacity on the Organizational Learning Process" (Organization Science, 2020), and earlier pieces like "Learning through the Distribution of Failures within an Organization: Evidence from Heart Bypass Surgery Performance" (Academy of Management Journal, 2015) and "Failing to Learn? The Effects of Failure and Success on Organizational Learning in the Global Orbital Launch Vehicle Industry" with Peter Madsen (Academy of Management Journal, 2010). His contributions have received the Academy of Management Journal Best Reviewer Award (2018); the article "Failing to Learn?" was a finalist for the 2010 AMJ Best Paper Award and featured on The Economist and BBC Radio; "Learning through the Distribution of Failures" appeared in Forbes and Fortune; and "Mitigating Hazards through Continuing Design: The Birth and Evolution of a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit" earned the Emerald Management Citation of Excellence.