Chief of Staff  ·  Executive Operations & Strategy

Jesse-Burton Nicholson, PhD

Executive operations / Program leadership / Organizational change

I run the mechanism that turns a leader's priorities into coordinated action — executive cadence, board-level materials, and cross-functional follow-through that closes without reminders. A decade of it inside a major research university, plus a PhD in strategy studying how organizations adopt radical new technology.

Fort Lauderdale, Florida  ·  Open to remote or South Florida–based roles (Miami / Fort Lauderdale / West Palm Beach areas)

$11M+
Annual budgets managed
300+
Employees supported — payroll & personnel
5-year
Organization-wide accreditation delivered
PhD
Strategy & Entrepreneurship

About

I've spent more than a decade running the operating machinery behind executives — the intake, the cadence, the follow-through. At the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business I ran the executive operating system for the school's successful five-year reaccreditation by AACSB, the industry body that certifies business schools — an organization-wide, audit-style program: intake, prioritization, owners, cadence, and on-time deliverables across every unit, with no direct authority over any of them. Before that I managed an $11M department of 300+ people. Before that I ran a family company end to end.

A lot of that work was trust work. Confidential personnel files and promotion cases, correspondence produced over the chief executive's signature — including responses to the university's most senior leadership — the kind of material where discretion and accuracy are the whole job, and where being the person who quietly makes the deadline matters more than being the person in the room.

Alongside it I earned a PhD in Strategy & Entrepreneurship, with a dissertation on how language and strategic framing shape the way organizations adopt radical new technology. That research isn't decoration — it's the reason adoption problems read clearly to me. I evaluated model responses as an independent contractor for OpenAI, my research runs on computational text analysis over large bodies of language, and I use LLM tools daily to automate my own routine work.

I'm based in Fort Lauderdale and open to remote or South Florida–based roles.

What I do

The work I've been hired for repeatedly, stated plainly.

Executive operating cadence

Quarterly business reviews, annual planning, initiative accountability, and follow-through owned end to end — built by hand, in institutions where nobody had built it before.

Board & executive materials

Consolidating scattered inputs, shaping the executive narrative, and packaging decision-ready materials. External advisory-board meetings planned end to end; correspondence produced on behalf of the organization's chief executive.

Cross-functional program leadership

Multi-year, high-stakes programs driven to timely completion across units I held no formal authority over. Influence, sequencing, and a refusal to let items go quiet.

Change management & process redesign

Team lead for a three-day kaizen digitizing personnel processes university-wide; paper-to-electronic workflows adopted by long-tenured stakeholders with strong opinions.

Budget & business operations

$11M+ in annual budgets with forecasts, variance reports, and risk analysis across 30+ restricted and endowed accounts; payroll and personnel actions for 300+ people; staff hired, trained, and supervised.

Research & AI-fluent analysis

NLP research on how language drives technology adoption; LLM response evaluation under quality and alignment frameworks for OpenAI; Python text-analysis stack; complex findings translated into briefs non-technical leaders can act on.

Experience

Operating roles from 2005 to 2025, most of them inside a large research university.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Management

2024 – 2025
University of Bologna · Remote
  • Synthesized complex research into executive briefs, decision frameworks, and options analyses for non-technical audiences — framing decisions with data, context, and judgment as a recurring deliverable.
  • Managed international collaborative research programs across institutions and time zones, from scoping through delivery — initiative accountability without positional authority.
  • Conducted NLP-driven research on how language patterns drive technology adoption, using a Python text-analysis stack across a program of working papers on innovation diffusion.

Independent Contractor — AI Response Evaluation & Ranking

2024
OpenAI · Short-term contract
  • Evaluated and ranked AI model responses across diverse domains under structured frameworks for quality, accuracy, and alignment — disciplined analysis under ambiguity, documented with precision.

Adjunct Professor & Graduate Teaching Fellow

2022 – 2025
University of Pittsburgh, College of Business Administration
  • Taught the Strategic Management capstone in person, hybrid, and online.
  • Supervised student consulting teams through real client engagements — scoping, stakeholder management, and final executive presentations.

Project Manager, Dean's Office

2016 – 2018
University of Pittsburgh, Katz Graduate School of Business
  • Ran the executive operating system for the school's successful five-year AACSB reaccreditation — intake, prioritization, owners, cadence, and on-time deliverables across every unit of the school.
  • Produced correspondence and reports on behalf of the Dean — the school's chief executive — including annual review letters, promotion reports, job offers, contract renewals, and responses to the university's senior leadership.
  • Planned meetings of the Board of Visitors — the school's external advisory board — end to end, plus multi-day strategic-planning and process-optimization events for school leadership.
  • Team Lead for a three-day kaizen, "Digitizing University Faculty Personnel Actions" — assembled the team, drove the redesign, and carried it through the resistance that followed.
  • Transitioned promotion and personnel-review processes from paper to electronic systems; handled sensitive personnel records throughout.

Department Administrator

2014 – 2015
University of Pittsburgh, Department of English
  • Ran all business operations for a department of 300+ faculty, staff, and student employees.
  • Managed budgets exceeding $11M annually, including 30+ restricted gift and endowed accounts, with forecasts, variance reports, and risk analyses.
  • Restructured administrative positions and streamlined processes — higher productivity and a 0.5 FTE reduction.
  • Supervised all full-time department staff: hiring, training, professional development, and evaluations. Coordinated renovation projects with Facilities Management.

Assistant to the Chair

2012 – 2014
University of Pittsburgh, Department of English
  • Digitized annual performance reporting, contract renewals, and departmental reviews — a department-wide behavior change adopted by long-tenured professionals with strong opinions.
  • Transitioned the monthly newsletter to email, cutting roughly $1,500 per month in costs.
  • Ran all faculty hiring searches end to end; prepared every promotion and annual-evaluation case file in the department.
  • Served as the department's liaison to executive leadership on all personnel matters; managed payroll; maintained the department's websites.

Student Development Specialist

2012
American University of Afghanistan · Kabul
  • Built two programs from scratch that outlived my tenure — the Student Ambassador Program and the Extra-Curricular Transcript — while teaching three sections of University Success.
  • Implemented processes bringing transparency and accountability to student activity fee spending; designed an accounting system to track student organization finances.

Assistant Program Manager, First Year Experience

2009 – 2012
University of Pittsburgh, Division of Student Affairs
  • Supervised and mentored 15–17 student workers across 100+ events a year, including week-long New and Transfer Student Orientation.
  • Managed $350k+ in annual budgets across two offices and built the budget for a new Office of Parent and Family Programs.
  • Authored the "Virtual FYE" proposal — accepted and fully implemented.

President

2005 – 2008
Data Mapping, Inc. (family business) · Crescent Township, PA
  • Ran every facet of a company providing cable-television franchise area maps and custom mapping services — operations, finance, and marketing.
  • Handled all accounting: QuickBooks, payroll, AP/AR, taxes, and P&L. Built the marketing and sales strategy, reaching 14,000+ industry contacts; redeveloped the website including the company's first online store.
  • Trained family members as successors in operations and accounting before transferring control.

Research

How language and strategic framing shape the way people understand, adopt, and spread radical innovations — studied with computational methods over large bodies of text.

Peer-reviewed publication
Academy of Management Perspectives
Relational competition: Interesting idea, questionable construct
Ao, Nicholson, Blatman, Madhavan & Prescott (2022) · Academy of Management Perspectives, 36(4), 1033–1048 · Second author
Working papers
ASIC, Hodl, Sats: New Language, Common Ground, and the Diffusion of Innovation
Empirical · computationally assisted qualitative research
Target journal: Academy of Management Journal
Using Language to Frame Radical Innovation Across Heterogeneous Audiences: Evidence from Blockchain and Ethereum
Empirical · computationally assisted qualitative research
Target journal: Journal of Business Venturing
Computationally Assisted Qualitative Research: Bringing Machine Learning to Qualitative Management Research
Methods paper
Target journal: Journal of Management
Understanding Innovations: The Role of Language
Empirical · behavioral experiment
Target journal: Strategic Management Journal
Selected presentations

Teaching

Capstone strategy instruction across every delivery format, plus first-year student success.

Strategic Management

University of Pittsburgh · 2022 – 2025

The undergraduate capstone, taught hybrid (Spring 2022), in person (Spring 2023), and online (Summer 2023), and again in 2025. Students worked in consulting teams on real client engagements, from scoping through final executive presentations.

University Success

American University of Afghanistan · Spring 2012

Three sections of the first-year student success course in Kabul, alongside academic advising on course selection, academic planning, and career preparation.

Education

Résumé

Get in touch

I read every message and reply. The fastest route is email.

Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Open to fully remote roles, and to on-site or hybrid roles in the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach areas.