FA C U LT Y P R O F I L E
Professor Shane Dikolli
Accounting ‘Can Change People’s Lives.’ He’ll Convince You Why.
More and more companies are starting to care about things that are not financial, like employee welfare and taking a customer-centric focus, so if accounting can help inform decisions that benefit people other than shareholders, I think it’s far from boring.” — Professor Shane Dikolli
By Jen A. Miller
O
n any given day, you can find Professor Shane Dikolli walking through Charlottesville, climbing up and down the city’s rolling hills. It’s a habit he picked up during the pandemic. “I set a goal of 30 minutes of walking, at least. Sometimes I walk five to six miles a day.” He’s thinking about almost anything: his kids, his students, the weather, what he wants to eat that day. But sometimes while he’s out there on those famous hills, he’s thinking about accounting, which he insists is not a dull topic. In fact, it’s vital “because it can change people’s lives. It can change people’s decisions, and those different decisions can change the path of a company and change the path of the people affected by them.”
Crossing Continents to Darden Dikolli is originally from Perth, the largest city in Western Australia. He was an academic lecturer at the Curtin University in Australia when he had the opportunity to do a teaching exchange in Canada. He jumped at the chance, in part to spend time with cousins he hadn’t seen in 20 years. While there, he met the woman who would become his wife. “We’re from opposite sides of the world. We settled in the U.S. because we felt like that was a compromise between the two,” he said. His U.S. path took him through the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University before landing at Darden in 2018. He came here in part because he wanted to do less administrative work and more teaching and research, and because Darden’s philosophy matched his academic style. For teaching, he likes the case method approach. In one case he uses in class, a hospital is buying supplies from both 28
THE DARDEN REPORT
distributors and manufacturers, which adds both cost and time to the supply chain. Students figure out how to make a more profitable and efficient buying process for all three groups and present their findings to their fellow students. “When they get to class, they’re ready to discuss the issues in the case and what the company could do to address those issues,” he said. “I’m facilitating rather than me just telling them things. It’s a way to get students engaged and involved, and they feel it more than they would if I was just lecturing them.”
Studying CEOs: ‘We’re Not a Fly on Their Shoulders’ Dikolli’s research has focused on CEOs and CEO behavior because of the massive influence they have on not just their shareholders and employees but the fabric of American life. “CEOs have a lot of power, but we can’t observe directly what they do. We’re not a fly on their shoulders,” he said, “but we can infer things from what we see in financial data and shareholder letters and what they do in terms of working with CFOs. We can observe from a distance because it’s really important to understand what CEOs do with the power they’re given.” In a 2020 paper published in The Accounting Review, Dikolli and his fellow researchers created the Integrity Index, which used computational linguistics to measure the integrity of CEOs, then related what a lack of integrity costs a company. The model looked at more than 30,000 CEO letters to shareholders, analyzing the number of causation-related words and other phrases associated with explanations — words like “because,” “hence” and “therefore.” “We figured that any CEO who has to over-explain things is
