Larry Gorman

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Professor Larry Gorman has been teaching finance, worldwide, in both universitiy and corporate settings since 1990.  He’s the author of 16 academic publications, but he tilts towards the importance of financial education (and its real-world application) over financial research. 

Following his twin passions for teaching and travel, he’s sought-out, and taught-in a wide variety of teaching environments – learning from each one along the way, and then utilizing each experience to better understand what behaviors and materials make for effective financial instruction.

For example, in addition to teaching full-time at Cal Poly (since earning his Ph.D. in 1997), Dr. Gorman served for eight years as the exclusive in-house finance trainer to Apple, worldwide – teaching the fundamentals of financial-forecasting throughout Asia and the US.  During the same period, for thirteen consecutive summers he taught corporate finance and international finance to MBAs and seasoned executives in Bangkok, at Thailand’s Sasin Business School.  He’s also been a visiting professor teaching:  corporate finance in Paris, France, international risk-management in Beijing, China, and international finance at Wharton.

Supporting his real-world focus, since 2007, he’s served as a member of Cal Poly’s Investment Advisory Board, helping to oversee the management of Cal Poly’s $200 million endowment.  Prior to his involvement in finance he was a commercial fisherman in Alaska (1978 – 1986), and a field-service engineer throughout the western and central US (1985 – 1987).

Drawing upon his teaching and work experience, for the last ten years Dr. Gorman has been writing an innovative undergraduate-level “Intro to Finance” textbook – recently published by Cognella (2021).   Unlike existent textbooks, its highly modular design (30+ optional appendices), makes it an effective tool at a wide variety of universities.  Throughout, it prioritizes intuition and valuation fundamentals over the more common ‘broad-brush’ approach. 

Interestingly, while “field-testing” the book at Cal Poly (from 2014 to 2020) standardized test-scores (as administered by the Educational Testing Service/ETS) in the area of finance improved from the 75^th to 94^th percentile.   During this period, the textbook was used in three completely different course-delivery modes:

• Traditional face to face lecture (2014-‘17),
• Hybrid / Flipped, (2017-2020) and
• (Covid inspired – and largely Canvas-automated) Asynchronous mode (2020-present) and in each mode the level of intuition and valuation skills developed well exceeded traditional norms.

Looking ahead, Dr. Gorman looks forward to working with other professors in order to facilitate a deeper, more intuitive, understanding of finance worldwide – and to do so in a time-efficient manner.  

He can be reached at: LGorman@calpoly.edu 

Education:

• Ph.D.  Finance, Kellogg Graduate School, Northwestern University (1997)
• MBA.  Finance, Western Washington University (1988)
• B.S.    Mechanical Engineering, Washington State University (1985)