Profile
Lutz Kaufmann is a full professor at WHU (since 2001) and OSCM Distinguished Scholar at the Academy of Management. He was the first Distinguished Scholar awardee from a continental European institution.
From 2010-2014, he was an Associate Fellow of Said Business School at the University of Oxford, UK. From WHU’s side, Lutz was the academic director of WHU‘s and Oxford‘s executive education programs for the German DAX company MAN, which won the EFMD Excellence in Practice Award for the best customized executive program in Europe in 2010. This was the first award of this kind for a German academic institution.
Lutz Kaufmann’s activities bring him in touch with executives from around the world. He has been involved in program direction, teaching, and coaching for DAX companies as well as startups. From 2003 to 2008, Lutz served as the Vice Chairman of the supervisory board of a German automotive supplier with about € 500 million in sales and 4,500 employees. In the 1990s, he worked several years with General Motors Europe Purchasing and the consulting company Horváth AG. He is also a co-founder of the home health care provider Medina Services GmbH and an angel investor for several WHU startups.
Lutz has published more than a dozen books on strategy, procurement, and negotiations. The first edition of his co-authored book China Champions climbed to number seven on Financial Times Germany’s book list in 2006. His work has appeared in the Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and many other academic journals. His research has been highlighted in numerous popular media outlets, including the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and ManagerMagazin. In 2014, Lutz was recognized as one of the top 25 best-selling authors over the past 40 years by The Case Centre, which means that these cases carry WHU’s brand into classrooms worldwide.
Lutz’s PhD students have won numerous national and international research awards. Eight of them have won the prestigious Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award since 2008, two in 2009 alone, having made WHU the first institution to win such an award in two categories in the same year. In 2016 and 2019, three of his PhD students won all of the most prestigious doctoral dissertation awards globally. It was for the first (and second) time that all these awards were bestowed upon researchers who were from the same institution and who belonged to the same research team. Between 2016 and 2021, four of his doctoral students received the IPSERA Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Since 2008/vol. 44, Lutz is the European Editor of the Journal of Supply Chain Management (JSCM). In this role, he helps shape the future research agenda of that field.
Professor Kaufmann studied business administration at the University of Giessen (Germany), where he received his first and second doctoral degrees (Habilitation). He also holds an MBA from Kansas State University (1990), where he was a Fulbright scholar.