Chair of Business Negotiations & Procurement I at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management
Lutz Kaufmann is a full professor at WHU and was recognized as the 2021 OSCM Distinguished Scholar by the Academy of Management (AOM). He was the first recipient of this Distinguished Scholar award from a continental European institution.
From 2010 to 2014, Lutz was an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, UK. In this role, he served as the academic director of WHU’s and Oxford‘s executive programs for the German DAX company, MAN; the program won the EFMD Excellence in Practice Award for the best customized executive program in Europe in 2010 – the first award of this kind for a German academic institution.
Lutz’s activities bring him into contact with executives from around the world. He has been involved in program direction, teaching, and coaching for large corporations, as well as startups. From 2003 to 2008, Lutz served as Vice Chairman on the supervisory board of a German automotive supplier that had about € 500 million in sales and 4,500 employees. In the 1990s, he worked for several years with General Motors Europe Purchasing and with the consulting company Horváth AG. He also is 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 also has been highlighted in numerous popular media outlets, including the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. In 2014, Lutz was recognized as one of the top 20 best-selling authors over the past 40 years by The Case Centre; as a result of Lutz’s development of these case studies, WHU’s brand is carried into classrooms worldwide.
Lutz’s PhD students have won numerous national and international research awards. Since 2008, eight students have won the prestigious Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award; in 2009 alone, two of his students took the award in two separate categories, making WHU the first institution to win the award in two categories in the same year. In 2016 and 2019, three of Lutz’s PhD students won the most prestigious doctoral dissertation awards globally. This achievement represented the first – and second – time that these awards were bestowed upon researchers from the same institution, belonging to the same research team. Between 2016 and 2021, four of Lutz’s PhD students received the IPSERA Doctoral Dissertation Award.
From 2008 to 2024, Lutz has been the European Editor of the Journal of Supply Chain Management (JSCM).
Lutz 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.
