Biography

Professor Johnson runs Nicusa Investment Advisors, an advisory firm focused on helping CEOs and Boards of Directors deal with strategy, capital allocation, shareholder value creation, and corporate governance. Johnson applies his 35 years of experience as an investment professional, combined with his 30 years as a business school professor, to help senior managers sort through these critical strategic issues.

Johnson has taught 52 semester-long courses on securities analysis and value investing to more than 3,000 full-time and executive MBA students.  Johnson received the Commitment to Excellence award 5 times (2016, 2017, 2019 and twice in 2022) from the Executive MBA graduating class in recognition of his outstanding commitment to their educational experience as well as the Dean’s Prize for Teaching Excellence in April 2017.

Johnson is co-author with Paul Sonkin of "Pitch the Perfect Investment, The Essential Guide to Winning on Wall Street," published in July 2017. Johnson is a contributing annotator to "The Most Important Thing Illuminated," by Howard Marks, and co-authored the history of value investing in "Columbia Business School: A Century of Ideas," a book celebrating the school’s 100-year anniversary. Johnson is also co-author of "The Gorilla Game, Picking Winners in High Technology," which reached Business Week’s best-seller list and was the number one best-selling investment book on Amazon.com for several weeks in 1998.

Johnson has an MBA in Finance from the Executive Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.