Professor William Putsis is Lecturer in Management at the Yale School of Management and Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Economics, and Business Strategy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He has previously served as Professor and Department Area Chair at London Business School, Associate Professor at the Yale School of Management, and Assistant Professor at Cornell University, where he also earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Economics.
In the private sector, Dr. Putsis is the founder and CEO of Chestnut Hill Associates, a strategy consulting firm he established in 1995, through which he has advised companies across six continents on dynamic competitive strategy and the use of game theory to build and leverage strategic control. He is Principal and Chief Economist at Knapp Capital Management, a vertically integrated real estate investment, management, development, and services firm and is an advisory board member of Quantum Leap Acquisition Corp (NYSE: QLEPU), a special purpose acquisition company. He also on the leadership team of two early-stage AI startups that have not yet been publicly announced, and is a contributor and External Advisory Board Member for CEOWORLD Magazine.
He is the author of three books on strategy: Compete Smarter, Not Harder: A Process for Developing the Right Priorities Through Strategic Thinking (2014), The Carrot and the Stick: Leveraging Strategic Control for Growth (2020), and Scarlett’s Revenge: Business Strategy for a Disruptive World (2025), with David Edelheit.
In the academic arena, he has published more than 30 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Marketing Science, Journal of Business, Applied Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Review of Industrial Organization, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Retailing.
