2008 Woodie Awards
Miami prof excels at local, international innovation
Issue date: 4/18/08 Section: OpEd Page
Professor Tom Speh has announced his plans to slow down this spring after more than 37 years in the classroom. Speh is a very special member of the Miami Tribe, and one that we need to try and duplicate over and over. I have been working with Roger Jenkins, Farmer's dean and Kirk Bogard of the Alumni Office to generate support for a tribute to Tom's great career and contributions at Miami University.
For those of you who sat in one of Speh's courses, you already know how special he is in the classroom. His last day of the semester lecture-on life's lessons-is for many students the best 50 minutes they ever spent in a classroom. Having Speh at Miami for all these years has been special. As a former industrial marketing and physical distribution business student from the early 1980s, I would put him in the same league as Wally Szczerbiak or Ben Roethlisberger.
Speh's career outside the classroom has been just as impressive. He is the only individual to have been president of both the Council of Supply Chain Management and the Warehousing Education and Research Council. Highlighting his career are his numerous accomplishments: Speh was invited to be part of a four-person academic advisory group for McDonalds as the company totally revamped its supply chain, as well as his work in other areas having resulted in the production of the Logistics Toolkit, which has been distributed to many universities around the world to be used in introductory marketing classes to teach the segment on logistics principles.
Speh has also had a global impact, and has been invited to speak on logistics and supply chain management in 18 countries around the world. In 2006, Speh was invited to serve on a 35-member advisory & communications board for the BestLog project, which was commissioned by the European Commission's Directorate General Transport and Energy-Speh is the only U.S. representative.
Heavily impacting the marketing field, Speh and colleague Mike Hutt published the first edition of the Industrial Marketing text in 1980. This edition was the market leader in its first year. The text-now in its ninth edition-is now called Business to Business Marketing. Every edition has captured over 50 percent of the market. The book is used in numerous foreign countries, including many European countries, Japan, China and India and has been translated into several different languages.
For those of you who sat in one of Speh's courses, you already know how special he is in the classroom. His last day of the semester lecture-on life's lessons-is for many students the best 50 minutes they ever spent in a classroom. Having Speh at Miami for all these years has been special. As a former industrial marketing and physical distribution business student from the early 1980s, I would put him in the same league as Wally Szczerbiak or Ben Roethlisberger.
Speh's career outside the classroom has been just as impressive. He is the only individual to have been president of both the Council of Supply Chain Management and the Warehousing Education and Research Council. Highlighting his career are his numerous accomplishments: Speh was invited to be part of a four-person academic advisory group for McDonalds as the company totally revamped its supply chain, as well as his work in other areas having resulted in the production of the Logistics Toolkit, which has been distributed to many universities around the world to be used in introductory marketing classes to teach the segment on logistics principles.
Speh has also had a global impact, and has been invited to speak on logistics and supply chain management in 18 countries around the world. In 2006, Speh was invited to serve on a 35-member advisory & communications board for the BestLog project, which was commissioned by the European Commission's Directorate General Transport and Energy-Speh is the only U.S. representative.
Heavily impacting the marketing field, Speh and colleague Mike Hutt published the first edition of the Industrial Marketing text in 1980. This edition was the market leader in its first year. The text-now in its ninth edition-is now called Business to Business Marketing. Every edition has captured over 50 percent of the market. The book is used in numerous foreign countries, including many European countries, Japan, China and India and has been translated into several different languages.
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