MICHAEL H. MESCON
The Man
Regents Professor Michael H. Mescon joined Georgia State in 1956 as an assistant professor of managerial sciences.
By 1963, having risen to a department chairman, he founded the Bernard B. and Eugenia A. Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise – the world’s first private enterprise chair. He was named the “pied piper of private enterprise” by the Wall Street Journal. The chair is now housed in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies (AYSPS), and as of last count, more than 270 such endowed positions exist worldwide.
In 1985, Mescon was appointed dean of Georgia State University’s College of Business Administration, now the J. Mack Robinson College of Business, a position he held until his retirement in 1990. Under his leadership, the college hired its first African American faculty member, Harding Young.
The Legacy
As Dean Emeritus of the business college, Mescon served as an Andrew Young School Advisory Board member and co-created the popular Policy Leadership course in the Department of Public Management & Policy. He continued finding ways to extend private enterprise studies into the nonprofit arena, helping AYSPS faculty and researchers develop the school’s growing Nonprofit Studies Program.
In April 2014, the Michael Mescon Endowment Fund was created to support educational opportunities in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. That fund was converted in 2018 to the Michael and Enid Mescon Endowed Chair in the college.
A prolific writer, Mescon was the author or co-author of more than 300 articles and books, including “Business Today,” recognized with the McGuffey Award in 2002 as the most successful introductory business textbook in the U.S., and bestseller, “Management: Individual and Organization Effectiveness.” He was named a Georgia author of the year for “Showing up for Work and Other Keys to Business Success.”
Mescon also founded and chaired the organization design consulting firm, the Mescon Group, in 1968, which merged in 2001 with Habif, Arogeti & Wynne (now Aprio, LLC).
Throughout his career, Mescon received numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Award of Excellence (twice), the Georgia Council on Economic Education’s first Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s Freedom Award, and honorary doctorates from the College of Charleston and The Citadel.
Mescon held a Ph.D. from New York University and undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Miami.