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Keenan D. Yoho, Ph.D.

Steinmetz Chair in Management & Strategy | Professor of Operations Management

At the Crummer Graduate School of Business we are dedicated to the art and science of management and leadership. As a faculty member, I am committed to the development of our students and supporting them in their goals to advance and transform organizations for the purpose of improving the lives of others.

Dr. Keenan Yoho holds the Steinmetz Chair of Management & Strategy and serves as Professor of Operations at the Roy E. Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College. A multiple recipient of the College’s highest teaching honors, he previously taught at the Naval Postgraduate School and held visiting professorships at SDA Bocconi and Politecnico di Milano, Italy’s leading business and engineering schools.

Keenan is a strategist whose expertise sits at the intersection of geopolitics, special operations, collective security, global supply chains, and global power competition. He advises senior leaders across commercial and military environments on navigating strategic, tactical, and operational decisions under conditions of uncertainty. His work centers on the strategic and operational challenges facing the application of military force which include the application of emerging technologies, intelligence and information sharing, the alignment of logistics, acquisition, and sustainment, and competition as a design problem in an era of networked and fast-evolving threats. He is a senior strategic advisor for Banor SIM in Milan, Italy in the area of geopolitics. He is also a Board Member of the Global SOF Foundation, which unites military, government, industry, and experts worldwide to grow special operations forces (SOF) capability and cooperation to face evolving security threats.

Dr. Yoho’s geopolitical experience spans senior military command, federally funded defense research, and the boardrooms of multinational industry. As Senior Special Advisor to the Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, he provided expertise to senior military leadership at the highest levels of national security decision-making. As a principal investigator at the RAND Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, he led studies for the Army, Air Force, and U.S. Transportation Command, developing policy guidance and improving the effectiveness of logistics, acquisition, and operational sustainment across two active theaters of war. Later, he advised the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the area of intelligence and information sharing. He has also advised a roster of multinational firms including Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, General Motors, BASF, and Merck KGaA in the areas of organizational transformation, supply chain management, across the United States, Germany, and Mexico.

He holds a Ph.D. in Operations Management, an M.B.A., and an M.S. in Industrial Relations from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a B.A. in Religion, with a concentration in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, from Temple University.

Research & Articles

Co-authored with Solon Simmons. | Chapter 38 from The Handbook of Social and Political Violence, 2025.

This chapter argues that nuclear weapons and globally networked surveillance have made unconstrained state violence increasingly difficult for sovereign states to sustain. While state violence has not disappeared, the authors suggest that future conflict will rely more on special operations forces, proxies, cyberattacks, deniability, and political pressure than on traditional all-out warfare. The chapter applies this framework to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and considers what these shifts mean for the future of peace.

https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119895534.ch38

Co-authored with Robert C. Ford. | Organizational Dynamics, 2025.

This article presents design thinking as a practical framework for helping organizations become more genuinely customer-centered. By emphasizing empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing, the approach keeps user needs at the center of innovation while encouraging rapid experimentation and continuous improvement. The authors also show how design thinking can improve both external customer experiences and internal operations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2024.101077

Co-authored with Aruna Apte. | Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management, 2024.

This monograph examines how humanitarian operations can respond more effectively to the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters. Using the United States Navy as a case example, the authors identify lessons related to capabilities, cost, logistics, and proximity of resources while also noting that future demand may exceed the Navy’s ability to respond globally. The work recommends that Southeast Asian countries and NGOs build greater self-sufficiency in disaster response and approach disaster response as a design problem.

https://doi.org/10.1561/0200000109