About Cameron Conaway
“A warrior poet.”
“A workplace feedback expert.”
“A writer who moves gracefully between liberal arts and martial arts.”
“One of the best professors I’ve had across several universities.”
Biography
Cameron Conaway is a management professor at the Penn State Smeal College of Business, where he teaches undergraduate and MBA courses on ethical leadership and social responsibility. Before Penn State, as a professor at the University of San Francisco, he built and taught the management department’s first MBA-level course on Strategic Talent Management. He has also led marketing for startups and Fortune 100s in Silicon Valley, most recently with Cisco Networking Academy, the world’s largest and longest-running corporate social responsibility education program.
Earlier in his career, Cameron was an investigative journalist and Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Fellow—an honor given to one journalist each year—which took him to Myanmar to report on the Rohingya genocide. He also received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to cover the environmental challenges facing the Ganges River. His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Forbes, among others.
A former mixed martial artist (2-1 professional record) as detailed in Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet, he lived in Thailand for three years, where he held a Muay Thai kickboxing fellowship, taught Shakespeare online for various colleges, and wrote about the horrors of sex trafficking—helping spark broader conversations about how this crime impacts boys. During this time, he also received an arts grant from the Wellcome Trust to write Malaria, Poems (Michigan State University Press), which NPR named one of the best books of the year. Shortly after returning back to the U.S., Cameron created Skillshare’s most popular poetry writing class.
A pivotal 2013 meditation retreat with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh set him on a new path of healing from childhood trauma and made mindfulness practice a quiet throughline in his life and teaching ever since.
These diverse roles and experiences crystallized a sustained interest in improving workplace feedback—an area his corporate career revealed as a critical weakness limiting both employee growth and organizational innovation. Today, he helps people around the world build these capacities through content like his webinar with Harvard Business School (attended by more than 2,000 higher education professionals) and his feedback guide.
A few throwbacks (way back)
