Ruchi M. Watson serves as Managing Director and CEO of the Goff Strategic Leadership Center at the University of Utah. Goff is a premier center for strategy and leadership, with a mission to transform individuals and organizations into value creators via their unique, research-backed, educational and experiential approach. Watson’s research focuses on the area of strategic leadership; her work has been published in Harvard Business Review.

At the university, Watson is a Professor (Lecturer) in the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy at the David Eccles School of Business. She has served in several roles at the Eccles School over the past decade, during which she oversaw a successful long-term strategic planning process for the college; founded the Hope Corps, a novel program for students to support small businesses and nonprofits impacted by the COVID pandemic; and built out the school’s Marketing + Communications and Business Intelligence teams. In 2021, Watson was honored as one of 30 Women to Watch by Utah Business magazine.

Prior to joining the university, Watson was a Senior Marketing Manager and Enterprise Strategy Lead at Target Corporation in Minneapolis. She was previously a consultant at Bain & Company in New York City and worked in Research and Development at General Mills, also in Minneapolis. Watson graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering and earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She holds a Doctorate of Education from the University of Pennsylvania.