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CHRISTOPHER
WONG
MICHAELSON

Half white, half Wong

ABOUT

Christopher Wong Michaelson is a humanities scholar who teaches in business schools at the University of St. Thomas and NYU; a critic of capitalism who believes business can and often does make the world better; a tenured professor with 25 years of experience working with business leaders; a philosopher who has called Leo Tolstoy the first moral psychologist and Mary Shelley the first AI ethicist; an ivory tower scholar who has written about love in The New York Times, fantasy football in The Athletic, religion in The Forward, and political humor in McSweeney's; an ethics expert who has tantrums on the tennis court; an occasional podcaster; a half-Chinese Jew who teaches in a Catholic institution; a husband and father who sometimes acts like a child; and a reluctant workaholic whose books, Is Your Work Worth It? (Hachette/PublicAffairs) and The Meaning and Purpose of Work (Routledge) (both with Jennifer Tosti-Kharas), examine the place and priority of work worth doing in a life worth living.

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After earning his Ph.D. in philosophical ethics and aesthetics from the University of Minnesota, Christopher joined the New York office of Price Waterhouse (now PwC) as one of the first five consultants in a business ethics practice in 1998. A few years into his business career, he accepted a full-time faculty position at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, teaching corporate ethics while keeping a foot in practice. For a while, he was PwC's only one-day-a-week employee, working on ten editions of its Global CEO Survey and as its first Strategy Officer to the World Economic Forum before leaving in 2016.

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Christopher went from Wharton to NYU's Stern School of Business in 2005, where he continues to teach in the Business and Society program. After moving home to Minneapolis, he also joined one of the largest business ethics faculties in the world at the University of St. Thomas in 2008, where he is the Barbara and David A. Koch ("coach") Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership. He is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics, affiliate faculty with the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, an academic fellow of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative, and the host of Work in Progress with Christopher Wong Michaelson.

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Having been raised in a world in which might was white and Wong felt wrong, he can now appreciate and even have fun with his multiracial heritage that is half white, half Wong. He and his wife, Beth, an artist, live near an urban lake in Minneapolis and have three kids and two dogs.

Christopher Wong Michaelson headshot
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