Lisa Jones Christensen’s career has taken her through several industries: investment banking in San Francisco, business development in Silicon Valley, humanitarian and nonprofit work in Honduras, and teaching organizational behavior and human resources at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and the BYU Marriott School of Business. Her motivation for personal, professional, and global impact is simple: It’s all about seeking continual growth.
After spending 10 years gaining industry experience, Christensen was ready to expand her impact beyond business development. She thought if she could become a professor and “could plant a new idea or spark student action and changemaking,” she says, “that would be such a multiplier to impact the world, and the business world would change.”
So Christensen earned her PhD in organizational behavior at UNC in 2008 and landed a spot as an assistant professor in the university’s Kenan-Flager Business School. By 2015 she was running UNC’s sustainability center and participating in international work that excited her. “I was working with influential global companies. We were trying new business models and new cases. We were including second-year MBA students in really meaningful long-term engagements,” she recalls.
After being recruited to teach at BYU Marriott, Christensen recognized that BYU could help her expand her impact. “I wanted to have more of an impact—globally,” she recalls, sharing that BYU’s mission and international alumni, students, and church networks helped her decide to accept the job offer: “I thought that my global work would be even more influential, more multiplied, and more supported at a place like BYU.”
Ever since she joined BYU Marriott, Christensen has been able to stay true to her research interests: refugee entrepreneurs, female founders, and the importance of trauma-informed leadership in the workplace. “BYU lets me do that,” she shares. When she’s not researching, Christensen is consulting in industry or sharing her experiences and crafting experience-based learning opportunities for her students—from undergraduates to MBA students.
Christensen is arming students in the MBA 570: Entrepreneurial Innovation class with a framework they’ll need to adapt to increasingly uncertain industry landscapes. “Our students have a chance to stand out, survive, and thrive because they have specific innovation skills,” she says, describing how the double diamond model teaches students to take theory-backed, evidence-based steps into the dark to discover avenues for growth and near-guaranteed product-market fit.
Students in MBA 570 gain hands-on experience and work in groups to discover pain points in different audiences by conducting interviews and surveys, observing audience behaviors, and innovating solutions. “These students are trained to deeply engage with people to identify unmet needs and existing pains and then use that data and related existing data to make leapfrog combinations that haven’t been seen before,” she says. “And ChatGPT can’t do that.”
Beyond working to enrich the experiences of MBA students in her classroom, Christensen is helping facilitate a new program within the Ballard Center for Social Impact, and she serves on two MBA committees focused on making the program more inclusive and equipping graduates with the tools and skills they need to stand apart in the workforce. “I came back to BYU Marriott to give back,” she says.
And Christensen gives back, in part, by supporting female MBA students throughout their experiences at BYU Marriott. She’s currently the faculty advisor for the Women in Management student association and oversees the group’s events and outreach efforts. And it’s not her first time supporting female business students: She has already spent years connecting female MBA students with mentors and role models.
“I would have friends come into town for advisory boards, and we would make ourselves available to the women in the MBA program for the common questions, because we all had different answers. I loved connecting female MBA students with colleagues whose experiences might match their life story,” Christensen says, recalling when she connected a student who was navigating the program while raising four kids to a colleague who had done the same.
Christensen particularly enjoys mentoring female students through the process of deciding whether or not to get a PhD. “It’s meant a lot to me that multiple women trusted me with their questions and their decision-making process,” she says. But she doesn’t just stop at helping them decide to pursue a PhD or not. Christensen pulls them into research she’s conducting and papers she’s writing, and she continues to nurture long-term friendships with alumnae-turned-colleagues by authoring papers with them and meeting up at conferences.
Her mentorship isn’t just limited to academic decisions, either. Christensen often talks with women about navigating singleness and maintaining forward motion in the family-centered culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “More of my life was spent trying to understand those struggles,” she says.
“When I was going through that, I wasn’t afraid to openly admit to myself and others what can be difficult about being single in a family-oriented church or being single older in a church where people get married young. I wanted to face these sometimes painful parts without turning angry or mad,” she says. “I fully love the gospel and believe that Heavenly Father wants his daughters to have dreams.”
So as a young adult, she invested in extended family relationships, did international service, and earned an MBA at BYU Marriott in 2000. While she was an MBA student, Christensen partnered with fellow students and now-retired faculty Warner Woodworth to found HELP International in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, a category five storm that devastated Honduran infrastructure in 1999. Christensen and her team raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, secured partnerships with a leading microfinance organization (FINCA) and created 45 banks, administered microcredit loans, and provided other humanitarian aid.
The experience helped Christensen gain an understanding of what matters most. “I didn’t just care about money,” she says. “I cared about other people’s opportunity and quality of life. I also cared about my personal footprint in the world.”
Because of the work experience and international network she gained as an MBA student, Christensen has continued working globally throughout her career, like helping a European consumer goods company identify ways to improve female health and sell more feminine hygiene products to Muslim women in rural Pakistan.
She has also consulted P&G on several projects, including discovering the perfect package quantity of disposable diapers in rural Nigerian communities and finding ways to encourage families in rural areas of Malawi to not only buy but also properly use a low-cost product to decontaminate drinking water. For Christensen, these consulting projects go beyond increasing revenue—she is focused on improving consumers’ quality of life, and she works to help companies do the same.
Christensen is proud of the work she’s done at BYU Marriott and beyond, but she says she’s not done growing and becoming. “Partly what I’m excited about isn’t so much what I’ve done, but that there are still so many exciting things left to do,” she says. “There’s so much more fun ahead.”
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Written by Sarah Griffin Anderson