Dr. John A. Grant
(Posted in May,2005)

Dr. Grant is an Associate Professor in Business at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio. Prior to pursuing an academic career he spent five years in sales and marketing with Proctor and Gamble and Pepsi-Cola. He then earned his doctorate in business administration from Arizona State University. His emphasis was in the marketing of services.

Dr. Grant’s major teaching and research interests are in the fields of sales management, service marketing and business ethics. He has been active in several professional associations including the American Marketing Association and the Midwest Business Administration Association. He has published work in the Journal of Personnel Selling and Sales Management and the Journal of Services Research. In addition he has presented papers at meetings of the American, Midwest and Southern marketing associations. He also earned national recognition for his innovative web-based design of the introductory marketing course at Southern Illinois University.

Dr. Grant made his first connection with the American National Business Hall of Fame while at Eastern Illinois University where he earned his bachelor and master of business administration degrees. After returning from Arizona to take a position at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in the 1990s, he began using hall of fame classroom presentations and then became a board member of both the Illinois Business Hall of Fame and the American National Business Hall of Fame.

Because both he and his students benefited from the sharing of the stories and lessons of the Hall’s laureates, Dr. Grant took the initiative to help the hall launch several new programs. He initiated the process of digitizing some of the hall’s programs; provided the initial work for the development of the hall’s web site; directed doctoral student candidates in the development of classroom presentation materials; and was one of the planners of the new hallway display program scheduled to be launched in 2006.

In 2004 Dr. Grant sponsored the proposal to move the executive offices of the American National Business Hall of Fame from Western Illinois University to Ohio Dominican University. In 2005 he was officially selected as the new executive director of the American National Business Hall of Fame.